


I’ll Be Home for Christmas

by forthegreatergood



Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Christmas Fluff, Christmas romcom movie au, F/M, Getting Together, Getting to Know Each Other, Hallmark Christmas Movie AU, Holidays, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, alternate universe - no one's a giant dick either
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-09-23 05:56:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 25,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17074652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forthegreatergood/pseuds/forthegreatergood
Summary: Franklin “Foggy” Nelson is a slick New York City attorney whose parents may literally die of heartbreak if he doesn’t make it to their new home in some sleepy village in North Country for Christmas.Matt's a small-town lawyer with a prickly exterior and a heart waiting to be melted, if only Foggy can figure out a way to keep his foot out of his mouth for five seconds.Unfortunately, Foggy's job tends to follow him around like a lost puppy, and Matt has his reasons for not trusting the holidays.“Aren't you with Landman & Zack?” Karen asks. “Or did I hear your parents wrong?”“I interned with them,” Foggy clarifies, “and they did offer me a position afterwards, but I wound up with HC&B instead.”“Because Landman & Zack are basically supervillains?” Karen hazards.“I signed about fifteen different non-disclosure agreements that prevent me from agreeing with that assessment in public,” Foggy tells her, and Matt huffs a laugh, something Foggy wasn’t sure he was capable of.  It’s a nice laugh, and Foggy wants to hear it again.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written for the [Hallmark Christmas movie AU prompt](http://returnsandreturns.tumblr.com/post/180930632103/if-somebody-wanted-to-get-me-a-christmas-present) over on tumblr, where it was also cross-posted in a series of nine sections.
> 
> * * *
> 
> All characters property of Marvel.
> 
> Not beta-read. Please post any noticed errors in the comments, and they'll get fixed.

Franklin “Foggy” Nelson is a slick New York City attorney--just ask him--whose parents may literally die of heartbreak--just ask _them_ \--if he doesn’t make it to their new home in some sleepy village in North Country, of all places, for Christmas. 

Every time he tries to ask why they even moved there, he becomes more convinced the whole thing’s a front for some cult and that his parents have been brainwashed or body-snatched or something.

“We stopped there on a road-trip and fell in love with the place, Foggy, that’s all!” his mother says, when he brings it up for the fifth time.

“Ma, that’s something people _say_ , not something people actually follow through on!” People especially do not sell the brownstone their own parents grew up in and relocate to Champlain after spending maybe a week there first.

“Well, it’s not like we see you any less now than we did when we lived two boroughs down,” his father points out. It’s a closing statement, and they all know it. Foggy’s dad never really stopped being disappointed that their only child went off and got himself a law degree instead of taking over the family shop. Foggy’s mom bought a house with four bedrooms because that way the grandkids she’s sure he’ll start producing any day now won’t be crowded when they come to visit. Foggy _cannot_ miss Christmas with them.

Foggy also cannot stand going through another round of mistletoe-related nonsense, which is practically guaranteed to happen if his parents find out he’s single this year.

Every time he contemplates the possibility, he has a cold-sweat flashback to the four years he spent unattached at Christmas during undergrad and law school, during which he dodged clumsy set-up attempts with every single solitary woman his parents could find, including sympathetic strangers they met on the subway. One notable candidate hadn’t spoken any English and had been under the impression that his parents were showing her the way to LaGuardia. He would rather chew his arm off than repeat the experience.

Marci the Benevolent, Marci the Good, Marci the Savior of Foggy-kind, has graciously agreed to pretend they never broke up for the handful of days it’ll take to make his parents happy.

“Foggy-bear, I’m only going to ask this once, because it physically hurts to care right now, but what about making _you_ happy?” Marci asks, arching one perfect blond eyebrow.

“Getting through this with as little trauma and as little drama as possible will make me the happiest man on earth,” he says, and he even thinks he means it. It would certainly make him a lot happier than he is now, living the life of a hunted man at the prospect of going home alone.

Everything’s going swimmingly, right up until Jessica Jones, their terrifying boss’s terrifying PI, drops three overflowing boxes on their desks. Two are all the evidence one of the firm’s clients needs to take her philandering-scumbag politician husband to the cleaners in divorce court and one of them is everything they need to prepare a prenup. 

Attorney-client privilege: Danny Rand is going to pop the question on Christmas Eve, and Jeri wants to make sure the man who’s practically her godson doesn’t do anything he’ll regret before the wedding.

“A Christmas proposal with a thirty-page prenup,” Foggy sighs. “How romantic.”

“I guess it’s better to have it just in case,” Marci points out, grimacing as she roots through the divorce boxes. “How does a city commissioner even have time for five different mistresses? When does the man even _sleep_?”

“Or spend time with his kids?” They’re old enough that Foggy’s met them; their client wanted to make sure their wishes were taken into account when it came to visitation and custody arrangements. They’re cute as buttons and sharp as tacks, and Foggy almost wanted to take them home himself; he doesn’t know how someone can treat his own family so callously.

They do what they can--Foggy stays till midnight two days running trying to sort through everything--but it’s pretty clear by the third day that Foggy’s not going to make it home for Christmas. It’s bordering on a relief, really, just to know.

“I’ll make it up to them on New Year’s,” he says, not sure if he’s trying to convince himself or Marci. “I’ll take the whole week. I’ll meet everyone in the entire town. I’ll even look at some property up there, if they want. We can tell them we’re getting engaged.”

“Okay, but I want a fake honeymoon in Oahu out of it,” Marci tells him, patting his hand. “And I’m taking half the theoretical house in the fake divorce.”

He scrawls a prenup agreeing to her terms on a spare napkin from last night’s take-out and signs it. She blots her lipstick on the line for her own signature, a perfect cherry-red kiss, and Foggy wishes terribly that he didn’t know all the reasons they’re bad for each other when they try to make the dating thing happen.

Marci--he’s pretty sure it’s her, Jeri wouldn’t think of it and everyone else had the seniority to take the week off--drapes a blanket over him when he falls asleep at his desk. When he wakes up, she tells him she’ll stay and take care of the caseload, and he’ll go by himself. He wants to argue, but he also wants to not tell his parents he’s spending Christmas on a divorce case. 

He goes out and gets Marci the prettiest, gaudiest, god-awfulest pair of Louboutins he can find in her size, wraps them up like he’s trying to impress a magpie, and hides them under her desk with a tag that says “From Santa.” Her squeal of utter delight can be heard all the way down the hall in his office, and it helps keep him warm on the twelve-hour train ride to Rouses Point.

Foggy’s not sure if it was a bad connection or willful misunderstanding, but he’s surprised to discover when he gets to Champlain that Marci dumped him for Christmas. His little-white-lie attempts to explain that she did nothing of the sort, they broke up months ago, this trip was a trial balloon for maybe getting back together and she simply couldn’t make it, that she’d actually done him a huge favor and was the only reason he’d been able to come at all, go unheard over his parents’ insistence that the town is brimming with eligible bachelorettes.

“We’ve been over this,” he reminds them gently.

“There’s plenty of eligible young men, too,” his mother assures him. That seems mathematically unlikely--plenty of eligible guys and plenty of eligible girls tend to wind up a huge pile of ineligible couples--but resistance is futile.

The town is nice, though. Even with the hustle and bustle of Christmas, Foggy can see why it appealed so much to his parents. It’s quiet. It’s cozy in spite of the snow. Everything’s so festive, it’s easy to forget that he’s going to party after party because his parents are trying to get him a date. Eventually, the third time his mother says, “He’s a _lawyer_ in _the city_ and his girlfriend _left him on Christmas_ ,” a pretty woman his mom’s age tells him he has to meet her daughter and pulls him aside. He’s in the middle of letting Mrs. Outerbridge down gently about the whole looking-for-a-rebound thing when she tells him it was an excuse. 

She’s looking to get divorced, but the town only has one attorney, and he’s been working for her husband for years.

_Oh._

Foggy stammers his way through his condolences, and somehow--the sixth glass of eggnog he gulped down fifteen minutes ago has a starring role in this drama, he’s sure--can’t figure out a way to refuse the woman his card or a promise to meet up and go over her case the next day. He jots down his personal number on the card like the guilty man he is; he can’t bill her for this on Christmas.

He’d like to blame the eggnog for agreeing to help his dad wrangle Christmas trees for a dozen people the following morning, but honestly it was probably shock from the Ghost of Christmas Divorce stalking him all the way upstate. Marci puts him on speakerphone so she can laugh at him properly when he calls her to complain.

“There’s something about your involvement that makes people want to never see their spouses again,” she tells him. “You’ll make a killing once you open your own practice.”

“Not helping,” he says. “Oh, do you know anything about putting up Christmas trees?” He’s never had a place of his own big enough to worry about it. “I guess the local lot’s giving everything that didn’t sell to people who might want one but couldn’t afford it and were too proud to say so.”

“Aw, that’s sweet,” Marci coos. “Does anything about me or how I live my life make you think I know anything about putting up Christmas trees? You’re contractually obligated to tell me, so I can stop doing it.”

“I think it’s the way you’re sweetness and light incarnate,” Foggy laughs. “You’re like a sugarplum fairy made flesh or something.”

“Just for that, I’m taking the whole theoretical house in the fake divorce, Nelson.”

The Christmas tree caper is, it turns out, not that bad. The whole thing with ‘too proud to say so’ means that they’re sneaking the trees onto people’s porches, ringing the doorbell, and running away like overgrown hooligans. The last delivery is the only one they stick around for, and Foggy sees why as soon as the door opens. Or rather, he sees why as soon as he’s capable of noticing something beyond how hot the guy is. White cane + dark glasses = blind.

“Delivery for a Mr. Murdock?”

That brow-furrowing befuddlement is the cutest thing Foggy’s ever seen, right up until Mr. Murdock inhales, and a sunny smile splits his face. Foggy’s heart melts.

“You shouldn’t have, Mr. Nelson,” he says, and his voice is smoke and honey and Foggy’s doubtless turning bright red or gawping like a fish out of water. It doesn’t help when Foggy’s dad introduces them--Mr. Murdock’s first name is Matt, and even the calluses on his hands are sexy--and Matt insists on helping where he can, and it turns out that Matt is also _built_.

“My father was a park ranger,” Matt explains, the second time Foggy asks if he’s sure he wouldn’t prefer Foggy handle the saw. “I learned how to do all this practically before I learned how to write.”

“Just let me know if you need an extra hand or two,” Foggy says cheerfully, backing off. He doesn’t want to come off as patronizing, and it’s not like he has a leg to stand on in terms of expertise. It’s also not like it’s a bad view, watching Matt work. He doesn’t have to worry about Matt thinking he’s a creeper--Matt can’t see Foggy ogling the way Matt’s muscles ripple under his knit cotton shirt as he handles the tree. And if he picks up on the way Foggy’s about as smooth as the road they drove up to get here, that doesn’t matter either--Foggy’s only in town a few more days.

Foggy’s dad has hauled the tree stand out of the closet and set it up by the time Matt’s stripped off the broken branches and cut a section of the trunk off, and the three of them carry it inside and set it up without further incident, provided Matt’s hand brushing against Foggy’s doesn’t count as an incident. Matt doesn’t act like it does, so Foggy’s sure it doesn’t.

It’s almost enough to make him forget all about the lunch date he agreed to with his future-divorcée.

Foggy can’t tell if it’s a relief or even more depressing that the whole thing seems so mundane, once he sits down with her. Her husband had an affair, a few years back. Her husband has been distant, ever since. He doesn’t know she knows, she’s pretty sure. He denies anything’s wrong, when she tries to talk about it. She’s tried this and that since then, hoping to rekindle the spark, but nothing seems to take. The kids are both away at college now, and she’s sick of haunting her own marriage like a ghost. “I love him, but it’s like coming home to an empty house. I don’t want to live like this until I’m too old to start over.”

Foggy can sympathize. He runs through her options, diagrams out the likely scenarios about assets given state law and manner of acquisition, rattles off the sorts of paperwork and agreements they’ll need to liquidate or transfer joint assets. She doesn’t want to hurt her husband, doesn’t want any more than what’s fair. It’s sad but refreshing, after seeing so much righteous rage and pain in cases like these. “Your best bet is arbitration. If you can come to an agreement without going to court, it’ll be cheaper and less acrimonious. You’d only need an attorney for the paperwork.”

Mrs. Outerbridge thanks him for his advice, and he lets her pay for his coffee and sandwich. She hugs him, before she leaves, and he’s so startled that he lets her. He thinks about it the whole walk back to his parents’ place, the way he can’t remember the last time he got a hug from someone besides them. 

Marci’s great, but she’s not a hugger. None of the lawyers they hang out with are, either, for both personal and professional reasons. The people he does pro bono work for tend to demonstrate their gratitude in baked goods instead of hugs, which is also for the best. It can’t really be the time he got Jessica’s boyfriend’s blatant set-up of a drug-bust record expunged, can it? 

Foggy decides it not only can be, but is, and he gets depressed all over again in spite of the fact that it was an awesome hug--Luke Cage is like if a teddy bear was also a bodybuilder, and getting that felony off his record had basically given him his life back. No wonder Foggy’s drooling over strange hotties during tree deliveries. Maybe he should let his parents set him up after all. A brandy-fueled whirlwind of a Christmas fling with someone who bakes and walks their dog and sings carols and goes to bed at a reasonable hour before he heads back to the unforgiving wasteland of being a lawyer might be exactly what he needs.

He regrets his moment of weakness as soon as he walks through the front door and finds the world’s youngest cookie exchange just getting started. There’s no way his parents are friends with the girls sizing him up and comparing him to whatever blatant falsehoods his mother has told their mothers about him. He’s called on to sample the wares as an impartial judge, and he makes a tepid joke about only being a lawyer that a few of them still have the courtesy to chuckle at. By the end of it, he’s agreed to accompany a pretty blonde named Karen to a party that evening. She has to go--she’s one of two reporters for what passes as the town’s newspaper, and it’s a town gala--but she’s still entitled to a plus-one. Her interest in him seems to straddle the line between polite and genuine, and Foggy supposes he’ll take it.

She picks him up in a battered old truck, and he can’t help but think of a pearl in an oyster when she opens the door and he sees her in her party dress. She radiates a sort of wholesomeness he’s not used to. Foggy almost misses Matt Murdock tucked into the back seat, and Karen follows his eyes.

“Matt Murdock, Foggy Nelson--” she begins.

Matt cuts her off with a grimace. “We’ve met.”

“This morning,” Foggy adds, forcing a bright grin. Matt is wearing a tux, and Matt looks amazing, and if Foggy can avoid the eggnog and the spiked punch and the rum balls, he might get out of this without embarrassing himself. He keeps up the chatter for all three of them on what’s a mercifully brief drive to the community center. Karen apologizes as soon as Matt’s out of earshot.

“He can get a tad reclusive around the holidays,” she says. “It’s like pulling teeth to get him out and doing things, but he can’t just sit home and mope. I don’t think he gets that people miss _him_ the same way he misses his dad.”

“I didn’t mean to intrude,” Foggy tells her, waving it off. “You two’ve been friends for a while?”

“We dated for a little bit, when I first moved here in high school. We’ve been friends since we broke up.”

Foggy thinks Matt might be happier if they were more than that, but Karen would know that better than him, and so he doesn’t say it.

Mrs. Outerbridge drops by to say hello when Karen drifts off on reporterly business, which seems to involve sipping the mulled wine and nibbling fruit tarts and taking notes about who made what. Mrs. Outerbridge looks five years younger than she did at lunch, and there’s a spring back in her step. Foggy scans the crowd and tries to guess which of the men is Mr. Outerbridge. The hangdog man in the blue sweater by the punch? The sullen one listening to the mayor tell a real whopper about fishing, if the hand gestures are anything to judge by? A call from Marci rescues him from a quartet of his parents’ friends who join in, trapping them both in what was meant to be a brief exchange of pleasantries, and try to keep the conversation going through sheer imperviousness.

Between the bad reception and the noise, he has to take the call outside, and he hopes for Mrs. Outerbridge’s sake that she finds the discussion of proposed zoning changes more fascinating than he did, because he’s not coming back in until he’s sure he can slip into a different knot of people. He passes Matt and Karen dancing, and if Matt scowling in a tux was something, Matt having fun in a tux is more than the universe should allow. 

“Marci? No, don’t hang up, the signal’s almost--”

Matt’s back to frowning when he hears Foggy’s voice, though, and Foggy tries not to take it personally. He’d only gone full-blown awkward-penguin at the guy and offered to saw up a Christmas tree like ten times in the space of a minute. Who wouldn’t want that in their house from a stranger during a touchy time of year, first thing in the morning?

The door slams shut behind him, and everything goes quiet just in time for his phone to drop the call. “Damn it.”

“Everything okay?”

Foggy turns, bewildered, and no, it really is Matt asking the question, a few feet from the doorway, cane loose in his hand. Then again, everyone and their brother’s probably well aware by now that Foggy’s from the city, and Matt specifically knows that Foggy’s useless. There’s likely some familial park-ranger instinct that kicked in and left him unable to dance with the prettiest girl in the room when someone might be wandering into a snow drift to die in search of better cell reception.

“I, uh--” Foggy holds up his phone, then kicks himself because it’s not like Matt can see it. “Yeah. Just, um, work. Calling.”

“Work’s calling at eight o’clock the day before Christmas Eve?” Matt asks blandly. “While you’re on vacation?”

“Well, you know, no rest for the wicked,” Foggy quips. Matt simply frowns at him. 

_Ha ha_ , Foggy thinks, _I’m a lawyer. Get it?_ Maybe if he tells enough truly awful jokes after his parents talked him up so hard, they’ll have to move back to their old brownstone and all three of them can forget Champlain exists. Marci does him the solid of picking that moment to call back, or maybe it’s his phone picking that moment to show some bars.

“One of the five mistresses is knocked up,” she announces gleefully.

“Is that really good news?” Foggy asks.

“That’s like an extra week of billable hours, so... yes?”

“Are we, I mean, it’s for sure it’s his baby?”

“It’s a matter of public record that she’s saying it’s his. Front page of The Post.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. We’re finding this out from _The Post_?” Foggy groans.

“Jones is good, but even she can’t exactly sneak a pregnancy test into someone’s toilet,” Marci points out. “I just wanted you to know, in case you were going stir-crazy up there in the Adirondacks.”

“Thank you, I appreciate the thought, please keep me apprised of any further developments,” he says acidly, and she laughs again and hangs up.

Even Matt’s shoulders and Matt’s waist and Matt’s hips in that tux, all topped with Matt’s serious little frown, can’t take the edge off the news Marci’s given him, and the cold is finally getting to Foggy anyway, so he heads back inside. Matt follows him, and Karen frowns at them, concerned but about what Foggy can’t guess. Foggy makes a beeline for the punch the second Matt declines a cup. He pours two and circles back to Karen.

“Sorry,” he says, handing her the drink. It’s not a _date_ -date, he doesn’t think, but he doesn’t want to be rude. “Is everything okay with Matt?”

There’s no risk of him overhearing them, not the way the mayor’s homed in on him, and Karen shrugs. “His other senses kind of... not make up for his sight, but help. Parties like this are a lot for him.”

Which makes sense. Parties like this are a lot for Foggy, and he doesn’t have to worry about flying blind. He winds up getting a ride back to his parents’ with their neighbors, because it’s been a long day and Karen can’t leave until the wrap-up, and besides Matt’s been hanging around them all night and is pretty clearly hoping that Foggy will take the hint and make himself scarce. 

Karen’s nice, and Karen’s lovely, and Karen’s not a thing that Matt can call dibs on, but Foggy’s only in town for a few days and he’s not looking to upset the apple cart. He means to text Marci a run-down of his exploits so far, and instead he falls asleep and dreams of kissing that scrunch-faced frown off Matt’s stupid, stubble-covered, handsome face.

When Foggy wakes up, it’s still dark. Like, really dark, not the sort of perpetual twilight the city slips into between regular daylight hours. He tries to go back to sleep and fails, and so he has breakfast ready and on the table when his parents finally shuffle downstairs.

“Happy Christmas Eve!” he says, grinning. They blink at him, bleary-eyed and hungover, and he’s reminded painfully of all the times he gave them the same look in college. He really should try to be less put out by spending Christmas in the sticks; he doubts he was nearly as quiet as he’d thought he’d been, back in the day when he’d snuck in past curfew. He owes them for past misbehavior. 

Coffee and food work wonders, though, and by the time he’s washing up, everyone is verbal again.

His mother hands him an enormous tin of cookies. “Be a dear and run them up to Matt Murdock’s place, would you? I meant to give them to him last night, but I forgot to bring them.”

Foggy starts to formulate an excuse--their SUV is a behemoth, he hasn’t driven in ages, and that was a compact car in the city--but gives up. He’ll drop the cookies on the front porch, knock as softly as humanly possibly, and then run. It will take him twenty minutes, tops, and it will make them happy.

Matt’s on his front porch, leaning against a beam with two mugs of steaming coffee in his hands, by the time Foggy turns off the engine. Of course Matt was already up. Of course Matt heard the car crunching and rumbling its way up the drive.

“Morning, Mr. Nelson,” Matt calls, and it’s night and day between that look and the look Foggy gets when he corrects Matt by opening his mouth.

“Wrong Mr. Nelson,” Foggy says wryly. He can see Matt debating what to do with the spare mug, and Foggy almost hopes he goes for it and starts drinking from both of them alternately.

“Would you like to come in?” Matt asks, in that curiously neutral way he did last night when he was prodding Foggy about the phone call.

“Sure,” Foggy chirps. Why not? With Matt’s hands full, it would be more neighborly at least to carry the ten pounds of baked goods inside for him. Then again, if anyone could make juggling two mugs and the cookies look good, it would be Matt. For all the scars and calluses, he has the hands of an artist--long-fingered, slender, clean-boned. Nimble. Foggy gets the door, and follows Matt inside, glad Matt can’t see him flushing.

“Coffee?” Matt asks, offering him the spare mug.

“Oh,” Foggy says, meaning to finish with _I can’t stay, I’m only dropping these off, my mother sends her love_. Instead, he sees the undecorated tree and says, “Yes, thank you, it’s so cold out.”

He unpacks the cookies, feeling ashamed and clumsy even though Matt can’t see him doing it, can’t tell how flustered he is. “They’re labeled, but I don’t think there’s a tactile marker on them...”

“I think I’ll be able to tell what they are when I bite into them,” Matt assures him dryly.

“All I’m saying is that, if there’s something you really can’t stand, I can shuffle it off to the side and mum’s the word,” Foggy says, sipping the coffee. It’s stronger and sweeter than he usually takes it, but it’s warm.

“And here I was under the impression that your silence was pretty expensive,” Matt says. “A couple hundred bucks an hour?”

Foggy manages a nervous chuckle in the face of that bitter edge. Matt’s off by quite a bit; Foggy’s not a partner yet. Matt also makes it sound like there’s something dirty about it, like it’s shameful to want to pay his rent and student loans and have something left to buy food with, after. “For you, pro bono. Are you planning on decorating the tree?”

Matt raises his eyebrows and takes a long sip of his coffee, and Foggy wishes he’d had the good sense to turn around and walk away while the getting was good.

“Aesthetics aren’t much of an issue, sure, but tinsel ropes are fun to put up, and…” he trails off. 

Matt isn’t listening to him. Foggy realizes it’s because there’s another car coming, this one squeaking something fierce every time it hits a rut or a divot in the track. He gulps down the coffee and puts the mug in the sink.

“You’ve got company,” Foggy says. “I should go.”

“Stay.” It’s so soft, Foggy almost misses it.

“Sure.” He retrieves the mug, refills it, and then tops Matt’s off too. He’s standing too close to Matt when the door opens, no knock or doorbell or even over-loud boot-wiping as a warning. Foggy’s heart thumps in his chest, Hell’s Kitchen instincts telling him to run. He’s only been mugged a couple of times, but he reads the news. If this was his apartment and someone was barging in , he’d already be dead of a heart attack, no gruesome murder necessary.

He must look like a startled rabbit or a burglar caught in the act, purloined coffee carafe in hand. The tall, dark-haired man in the doorway blinks at him, less caught by surprise than simply surprised.

“Frank,” Matt says coolly.

“Matt.” Frank’s open smile and relaxed posture don’t seem to really warrant the frosty reception Matt’s given him, but then Foggy’s only just met any of them. There might be a long and storied history of jackassery between the two of them, or Frank could have recently stolen Matt’s girlfriend, or practically anything. Something certainly flipped the switch between Matt wanting Foggy the hell out of his house and Matt wanting any buffer he could get.

“I’m not interrupting, am I?” Frank asks, glancing at Foggy and gesturing toward the door.

“Kind of,” Matt snaps. “Foggy here’s going to help me decorate the tree.”

Foggy barely manages not to say “I am?” out loud, because he would have offered, but it also seemed like the last thing in the world he could get away with doing.

A slow grin spreads across Frank’s face, and Foggy’s surprised to see that, in the right light, he’s really a very handsome man. “Well, don’t let me stop you,” he laughs. “Merry Christmas, Red.”

“Merry Christmas to you, too, Frank,” Matt says, and some of the chill finally leaves his voice.


	2. Chapter 2

Foggy waits until Frank’s truck is well down the drive before he ventures to ask, “So, did you really want to, or…?”

Matt blushes, his cheeks turning a faint pink and somehow making him look even more adorable than before, which isn’t something Foggy would have thought physically possible.

“I, um, don’t entirely recall what I have for decorations,” Matt confesses.

Foggy takes that as a yes, at least a conditional one, and Matt leads him to the closet where everything is stored. The old-style globe lights are beautiful but admittedly pointless, and Foggy doesn’t want to risk breaking them by putting them up when Matt can’t enjoy them. Lifting them out of the way reveals yards and yards of easily-replaced, nigh-indestructible tinsel rope, and Foggy feels like a magician with a sleeve full of scarves as he pulls it out of the box. He only stops when he hits a fake wreath that he’s not going to bother asking Matt about.

Matt smiles at him, and Foggy realizes that he’s been humming a carol to himself. “I didn’t get the impression you were much one for Christmas spirit.”

“I, well.” Foggy stops. He loves Christmas, he does, it’s just that this year’s been a lot. Last year was a lot, too, and the year before that, and he suddenly can’t remember the last Christmas he really enjoyed instead of spending braced for an impending holiday tsunami. 

“Christmas is great,” he says finally. “But it can be hard to hit the brakes on eighty-hour weeks.”

“No rest for the wicked,” Matt murmurs. It feels gently mocking, coming from Matt. Foggy wants to get defensive, but there’s no point. He’s gone in a couple of days, and he’s not coming back, and besides, he wouldn’t really expect Matt to get it if Foggy tried to explain.

“Let’s get this tinsel up,” Foggy says instead, draping piled loops of it over Matt’s arms. “Please tell me you’re not one of those weirdos who insists on doing the back of the tree, too.”

“I might be,” Matt laughs, raising his eyebrows. “What’s the alternative?”

“The _superior method_ ,” Foggy informs him, because it is, “is to zigzag from side to side, top to bottom. Nobody’s going to see the back, so why torture ourselves going all the way around it?”

Matt snorts, and Foggy rolls his eyes.

“I mean, you clearly have guests,” he points out. “They’re going to look at the tree, and they’re going to ask who helped, and then I’ll be known as the guy who put you through all that, and my good name will be sullied forever.”

“They might assume I did it myself,” Matt says.

“When’s the last time you decorated a tree?” Foggy retorts, stretching onto his tiptoes to reach the point. He can’t quite, but Matt can, because he’s tall in addition to being handsome. “Can you start it, please? I can’t make it to the top.”

He reclaims the bulk of the tinsel and hands Matt the beginning of the rope. Matt feels his way up the tree, and Foggy doesn’t miss the way he inhales the clean pine scent, the way his features soften even as his brows knit while he feels for the right branch.

“Like this?” Matt asks, looping the end around the tip.

“Perfect.” Foggy starts with a generous drape, shuttling the shrinking pile back and forth from one wall to the other, narrating to Matt as he goes, until the tree gets too wide for him to do it comfortably by himself. “You stand there, and I’ll stand here, and we can bucket-brigade it back and forth.”

Matt does as he asks, and if Foggy blushes harder every time their hands touch, that’s fine. Matt’s not going to notice. It’s no time at all before they’re done, and Foggy tries to be pleased at how quickly he’s gotten back out of Matt’s hair.

“Plus doing it this way makes it a snap to take back down by yourself, if you want,” Foggy says. “Though it’s always faster with another person helping.” 

He goes to put everything they’re not using back, then notices something under the wreath--a sturdy box, taking up the whole bottom of the ancient floppy cardboard one he’s been rooting around in. When he opens it, he gasps.

“What?” Matt asks, frowning. “Rats?”

“I found the tree-topper, that’s all,” Foggy tells him quickly. It’s the most beautiful angel he’s ever seen, all gold leaf and taffeta. His parents are still using the posterboard one he made in third grade. “The angel? Do you want it--”

“Put it back,” Matt says tightly, and Foggy freezes. “Put it away.”

“Okay,” Foggy says, like he’s soothing a panicky client. “It’s okay.” 

He packages it back up as carefully as he can, closes the box up, and slides everything back into place in the closet. 

“All taken care of, safe and sound, cross my heart.”

Matt turns away, embarrassed, and Foggy catches the glint of red in his hair where the morning light coming in through the window hits it. Frank’s nickname for him suddenly makes sense. It was probably brighter when Matt was younger.

“I don’t mean to be nosy,” Foggy begins, and he watches Matt stiffen. “But were you and Frank an item?”

“An item?” Matt echoes, and whatever question he was expecting Foggy to ask, it seems it definitely wasn’t that.

“Together,” Foggy clarifies.

“Me and _Frank_?” Matt asks, a borderline-hysterical hiccup up a laugh escaping before he can stop himself. Foggy’s heart breaks a little at the shock in Matt’s voice, which is dumb because _he is leaving in a few days_. Matt can be mopey and pretty and painfully, no-homo straight in the woods for the rest of his life, and Foggy will never see him again. He’ll finally make partner, and get an apartment big enough to have guests, and he’ll make his parents come visit him in town, and Champlain’s firehose-gush approach to holiday cheer won’t be something he has to deal with.

“I’ll take that as a no, then,” Foggy says awkwardly, trying to salvage the morning.

“Our dads worked together in the ranger service,” Matt explains, not seeming to notice. “He usually spends Christmas visits reminiscing. I… can’t. Not this year.”

“Fair enough.” Foggy glances around, finally taking in the actual decor of the house. The shelves are lined with books--he can’t read Braille, but they’re nice, leather-bound, and in good shape--and there’s a big wooden desk in the room directly off the living room. “It was nice seeing you again, but I should head back, and let you get back to… uh, whatever it is you do? Sorry, it just now occurred to me that I didn’t ask when we first met.”

“I’m a lawyer,” Matt says, and there’s a smirk tugging at his lips that makes Foggy’s knees go weak. Then what those lips _said_ hits Foggy like a ton of bricks.

“You’re a lawyer,” he repeats stupidly.

“You sound really surprised by that.” It’s definitely a smirk now. Maybe Matt’s not currently practicing? Maybe he just got back from law school to expand the town’s options from the lone lawyer who works for Mr. Outerbridge? Maybe he hasn’t passed the bar yet?

“No, it’s, uh.” It’s Foggy’s turn to laugh because Jesus Christ, of course Matt’s a lawyer, that neutral flat tone of his is classic cross. “I’d heard there was _a_ lawyer in town, and for some reason I somehow assumed it was like a ninety-year-old Gregory Peck still in his Atticus Finch suit. I’m sorry, it was dumb. I should have known the second you asked if I was sure it was work calling last night.”

The smirk slides off Matt’s face, and his cheeks color. “Ah, yeah. Sorry, that was out of line. It just sounded like you were calling your ex.”

Foggy winces and wishes he’d been able to steer his parents away from telling everyone that Marci dumped him on Christmas. Though he supposes it was nice of Matt to come check on him.

“One and the same,” Foggy says. “Ex-girlfriend, past and current coworker.”

“That sounds…” Matt takes off his glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose, and Foggy takes the chance to study the pair of gorgeous hazel eyes those glasses were hiding. Matt seems younger without the glasses. Matt’s also clearly never spent much time in a big or high-stakes firm; Foggy’s found literally zero outfits that don’t have some flavor of incestuous, pressure-cooker environment. It’s a lot, but when there are no days off and millions of dollars are on the line and everybody goes for the throat the second they hit the courtroom door no matter what, _a lot_ is unavoidable.

“Part of the rat-race,” Foggy tells him. “Friends with on-again, off-again benefits.”

“Doesn’t that get lonely?” Matt asks, as if he wasn’t going to spend the day alone, moping in his empty house in the woods with his undecorated tree on Christmas Eve.

“Polar opposite,” Foggy says, trying to remember the last time he had more than an hour to himself without being asleep. “Speaking of which, can I give you a ride back to town? Save Karen the trouble of coming out to get you for the live nativity happening at noon?”

He hadn’t meant to eavesdrop, but he hadn’t been able to avoid hearing her extract a promise from him to be presentable by eleven, which they aren’t so very far from now, between decorating and talking and dodging Frank. And if Matt was going to casually listen in on Foggy’s phone conversations, well, maybe it wasn’t considered rude around here.

“I’m barely decent,” Matt protests. Foggy looks Matt over--the battered jeans and the soft gray henley, sleeves rolled up over his forearms, the tousled hair and the five o’clock shadow.

“You’re a lot better than decent, from where I’m standing.” It slips out, and Foggy wishes the floor would open up and swallow him when Matt goes wooden and sour-faced with surprise. “Sorry, I meant you look fine. I’ll, uh, get going, let you get ready. See you there, I guess.”

Foggy practically bolts from the house when Matt makes no move to stop him or see him off. His face is on fire, and he feels like he’s so off his game he’s on a completely different field, and it’s not the worst thing in the world when his mother texts him a twenty-item list of ‘a few little odds and ends’ that she needs picked up at the store.

Marci calls when he’s halfway through it, and it’s somehow an intrusion of normalcy into a surreal situation when the first thing out of her mouth is, “Tell me Colleen Wing is with you.”

“As much as I love sweeping beautiful women off their feet and out of relationships with rich bastards--” The half of his brain still trying to figure out if there’s an actual difference between light and dark corn syrup refuses to come up for air, because then he’d have to register why Marci is asking him this.

“Damn it,” she sighs.

“I mean, I assume you’re asking because you’ve exhausted all other options?” Foggy’s only met Colleen a few times, but she always struck him as borderline being put off by Danny’s wealth, like it doesn’t match up with the Danny she’d fallen in love with. Maybe Jeri’s snooping finally pulled the trigger and is making her rethink this whole thing. God help Danny if that’s the case--he’s head over heels with Colleen, and any of the born-rich socialites he might move on to next will eat him alive. “Including the one where we admit they’re both competent adults in whose lives we shouldn’t be meddling?”

“The options we can exhaust without Danny finding out we lost his girlfriend, yes.”

He can practically hear her polishing her nails nonchalantly on her cashmere sweater. Probably the one that clings to her curves perfectly and really makes those baby blues of hers pop. Foggy thinks of Matt in that stupid henley and can’t help swallowing.

“If you were going to make peanut brittle, would you use light corn syrup or dark corn syrup?” he asks, because he didn’t graduate cum laude from Columbia to have this conversation on Christmas Eve in the only grocery store for ten miles.

“Ugh. I swear, every new version of the Trolley Problem finds a way to get even dumber,” she scoffs.

“Look, I have to go,” he tells her. There’s a grandmotherly-looking woman who’s been carefully reading the ingredient label on a bar of cooking chocolate since he picked up the phone, and she’s either waiting to answer his corn syrup question or eavesdropping like a champ. “Text me if you need me to come back, okay?”

“That bad?” Marci asks.

“You have no idea,” he sighs. He hangs up, plasters a cheery smile on his face, and turns to the woman with the chocolate. “Excuse me, ma’am?”

When Foggy returns to his parents’ house, in triumphant possession of the correct type of corn syrup, his mother is glowering at him like the time she found a Playboy and three joints stuffed between his mattress and the box spring. He breaks out in a cold sweat, racking his brain for what he might have done recently.

“You could have told us to expect company!” she snaps, voice too low to carry.

“Company?” The cold sweat turns icy, and Foggy tells himself he’s being ridiculous. Colleen would never in a million years--

“Foggy!” Danny calls, his beaming face popping up over the banister from the second floor.

“Oh god,” he breathes. Jeri’s going to kill him. “Danny?”

Danny springs over the railing and lands lightly on his feet, and Foggy has never, not once in all the time he’s known Danny, been able to forget that Danny is practically a ninja. He sweeps Foggy into a bearhug, and Foggy gives in to it, if only to knock Mrs. Outerbridge out of the running.

“This was the best idea!” Danny crows. He half lets Foggy go, keeping one arm draped over Foggy’s shoulders, and grins at Foggy’s mother. Foggy tries to find some way to fit Danny “Billionaire Martial Artist” Rand smiling at Foggy’s mom into a rational universe and fails. Foggy doesn’t remember having any ideas that could possibly have led to this.

“He’s trying to say thank you for the invitation,” Colleen sighs from the stairs. “We’d never have thought of coming out to the country for Christmas.”

“Joy and Ward wanted us to go with them to the Bahamas, but it’s not really Christmas without snow,” Danny says, squeezing Foggy’s shoulders. Ten minutes ago, he wouldn’t have assumed either Danny or Colleen even really celebrated Christmas, but apparently that was a question the universe decided he needed answered. Danny’s smile somehow gets even brighter. “Oh, Mrs. N, do you mind if we build a snowman?”

“Knock yourselves out, kids,” she says, her guests getting a misty-eyed tenderness Foggy hasn’t since grade school.

Colleen trails far enough behind Danny that Foggy manages to catch her arm and ask, desperately, “Invitation?”

He hasn’t gotten black-out drunk since his first year in college, when he was still figuring out the difference between beer and liquor. He doesn’t think he has either of their numbers in his phone. He’d definitely remember calling Danny Rand, needer of a Christmas prenup, and inviting him out to the sticks for the holiday. Colleen frowns at him.

“Danny said he needed someplace Christmasy and quiet and away from the paparazzi, and you posted a million pictures of Champlain and said this house could fit a football team? I know you didn’t get back when he facebooked you, but he said it would be…” She trails off and squints like she’s getting a headache. “It’s not fine, is it?”

“No, it is.” Foggy’s trying to reconstruct the series of events that led to this, and he’s beginning to see where he went wrong--when he decided to be a lawyer instead of a butcher, honestly--but he’s sure he can somehow make it fine. His parents will understand how him accidentally setting his album from the last few days’ festivities to friends+family instead of family-only resulted in two strangers moving into their guest room. Jeri will think it’s hilarious, if he can find the right way to explain it. “It’s absolutely fine. Go build your snowman, I’ll help dig out the spare linen and see if we need anything else from the store.”

There’s enough food in the pantry to feed a football team or an army, whichever shows up uninvited first, and his mother is at least understanding when he explains that he didn’t think Colleen and Danny were really coming, never mind coming to stay with them. It’s easier than trying to explain that he didn’t invite them in the first place, and the whole thing is a giant mix-up that might cost him his job. 

Is there even a hotel in town? There has to be at least a bed-and-breakfast somewhere out by the highway, Foggy reasons, but Champlain is the sort of place where people only seem to visit because they already have family there. In retrospect, this makes a certain amount of morbid sense--Danny’s social circle is composed of either hippie anarchists with radical open-door policies or people so rich they don’t know how many houses they own with a bottomless generosity toward their financial peers. Showing up with good booze and a big smile meant everyone he’d dropped in on in the past decade had been absolutely overjoyed to see him. Which… Foggy’s not thrilled about it, no, but he’d already be loading any other client’s belongings back into their car and kindly-but-firmly driving them to the nearest Hilton, so he supposes Danny’s charm is still working.

He tells his mother that Danny’s an orphan, and that Colleen lost her dad a few years back, and that they needed a quiet romantic getaway. He skips the part where could Danny buy the whole state and Colleen’s on record as knowing thirty different ways to kill a guy with a paperclip, and the part where he didn’t know they were leaving the city at all, and the part where he and Danny aren’t friends so much as they’re acquaintances and Danny is really, really friend _ly_. She sends him back to the store for another round of things that she’d be embarrassed to be caught short on, now that they’ve got two unexpected guests, and Danny abandons his half-finished snowman to accompany him.

Danny being right there means Foggy can’t text Marci for help, for solace, or for perspective. Danny shows him the ring at the first stop sign they hit, begging for his opinion. In Foggy’s opinion, it’s less a ring and more twenty-five percent of a set of diamond-encrusted brass knuckles. Platinum knuckles? He’s never had to think about what an excessively rich person would use in a street fight, and he hates that he’s thinking about it now. In Foggy’s opinion, he shouldn’t have to have an opinion on Colleen’s engagement ring.

“Uh, well, there’s only two people whose thoughts on this really matter,” Foggy reminds him. “Did Joy help you pick it out?”

It’s very _her_ , Foggy thinks. All sharp angles and gritted teeth. Joy Meachum is at the top of his now-existent list of super-rich people he could see getting arrested for brawling in public.

“I had it designed, by a jeweler she recommended,” Danny says, looking hurt. “It should be one of a kind, just like Colleen, don’t you think?” 

Danny spreads his hands, and Foggy has a nightmare premonition of a ring worth more than he’d make in the next decade as a senior partner flying out of its black velvet nest and landing somewhere in the clutter of his parents’ SUV. He snatches the box and pretends to examine the ring more closely. Aside from the implicit promise of grievous bodily harm, it’s very nice. Unfortunately, he’s never seen Colleen wear jewelry and has no idea what her taste is like.

“It’s beautiful.” Foggy snaps the box shut and hands it back. “But you’re the one who really knows Colleen--do you think she’ll like it?”

Danny nods, a lovesick smile parting his lips. “It’s only that everyone knows you have good taste. Marci always looks like a fashion plate, and her favorite things always turn out to be presents from you…”

Foggy laughs. This is, at least, familiar territory. “That’s because I have well-honed instincts for what she’d absolutely love, not because of some inherent talent on my part. That’s what you’re looking for, man--you want to know her so well that you can find something and think, ‘Colleen would love this.’ and be right.”

Danny lapses into thought at that, and the drive passes in silence until Danny spots the Three Magi, in what looks like a set of very nice color-coordinated bathrobes, and shoots Foggy a questioning look.

“Live nativity at noon,” Foggy explains, hoping he doesn’t have to explain any further.

“Are we going? I’ve never been to one.”

Foggy assures him that yes, everyone can go. It’s kind of a relief to have an excuse to avoid Matt; Foggy had forgotten all about sticking his foot in his mouth barely ninety minutes ago, but seeing the square all decked out and lit up for the reenactment reminds him that he’ll be seeing Matt again in barely an hour. Danny seems weirdly fascinated by the lack of anything resembling variety in the freezer aisle, so Foggy leaves him to it and does a speed-run on everything on his mom’s latest list. It helps that he spent so much time waffling on the earlier trip that he could find his way through the store blindfolded at this point.

When Foggy finds Danny again, Danny drops to one knee, whips out the box, and opens it with a flourish. 

Foggy blinks at him, looks at the ring, and shakes his head. “Absolutely not.”

Danny pouts and produces a black Amex to pay for everything, and Foggy offers a token protest so he can tell his mother he tried. The lady at the one open register gawks at them like she’s watching a soap opera play out live, but she doesn’t ask anything more than if they found everything okay. Foggy asks for the ring back while Danny loads everything into the back seat. It’s dazzling in the sunlight in the same way it had looked like a chunk of ice carved straight from a floe under the artificial lights in the store.

“See how it looks in candlelight,” Foggy advises, handing it back. “And definitely don’t show it to her for the first time under fluorescents. Too cold.”

“See?” Danny says. “I’d never have thought of that.”

“You thought to check,” Foggy placates him, though what made Danny think proposing in a tiny grocery store might be romantic is beyond him. But what does Foggy know? He meets people at parties and because his parents are playing matchmaker and by giving strangers trees they didn’t ask for, not by challenging them to single combat at technically-unlicensed dojos in front of a flock of sixth-graders.

There’s just enough time to finish the snowman before they have to leave for the nativity, and Foggy barricades himself in his room and calls Marci. “Hey, any chance Jeri’s also missing Danny?”

“Now that you mention it…” Marci stops, and he hears muffled swearing. “You don’t think they’re eloping, do you?”

Foggy can honestly tell her the idea hadn’t occurred to him, but now that she’s brought it up, it makes a certain horrible sense. He thinks Danny would want to put more planning into it than that, but Danny operates on a system that Foggy’s never been able to work out, and he can totally see Danny’s “Will you marry me?” preceding a “Right now, today?”.

“Maybe?” Foggy offers.

“Foggy.” She can always tell when he knows something and isn’t telling her.

“Well, it turns out they were in the last place anyone would ever look. I was hoping that maybe it was a pair of lookalikes impersonating them or something, but--” He can hear Colleen laughing in the yard, and when he peeks out the window he sees Danny trying to fix the snowman’s extremely weird smile.

“ _Foggy._ ”

“They’re at my parents’ place. They’re coming to a live nativity with me in ten minutes.”

It’s the first time since they met that Marci is literally speechless, and it’s a full two minutes before Marci says, “I must be having a stroke, because it sounded like you said they were with you.”

“I didn’t know they were with me when you asked if they were with me.”

“How? Why?” He can hear her heels clicking on the tile as she paces. “And a _what_? Please tell me you won’t have some poor woman giving birth in a barn in this weather as part of some bizarre Children of the Corn ritual.”

Foggy’s lips purse. He’s pretty sure that’s not what they’re doing. It would be weirdly on-brand but also a bit much, even for this place.

“It’s a manger scene with live animals and real actors instead of light-up plastic statues,” he says. “Okay, we’re leaving. I have to go. I just wanted to let you know so you could, uh, stop worrying?”

“You wanted to let me know so I can figure out a way to tell Jeri without her firing you so hard your diploma spontaneously combusts.”

“It would be nice if that didn’t happen,” he says weakly. As much as he disagrees with a lot of the decisions HC&B makes as a firm, they pay him decently, and they’re pretty consistent about not being huge jerks if they can help it. It’s a Venn diagram with a tragically small overlap, at least in the city.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she promises, and it’s in that tone that means he’d owe her his firstborn if she had any interest in children whatsoever.

“ _Thank you._ ”

It’s absurdly cheerful, when the five of them pile into the car and head to the town square, and Foggy finds himself relaxing. As protective as Jeri is of Danny, he’s a grown man, and he and Colleen are in love. Colleen shows Foggy a slideshow of every single ridiculous smile Danny gave the snowman before giving up on it, and Foggy can’t stop giggling.

“How?” he finally asks Danny, who shrugs.

“Beginner’s luck?”


	3. Chapter 3

The square is packed when they finally get there, and Foggy thinks everybody in town must have showed up. They’re running late, but the actors are milling around, drinking hot chocolate, adjusting their fake baby-bulges, and holding the swaddled doll standing in for baby Jesus like a sack of flour. Two of the magi are working on getting a fire going, and the mayor’s wife is arguing with the guy supplying the animals. Foggy spots Karen hovering at the edge of that conversation.

“What’s going on?” Foggy asks. If anyone knows what the hold-up is, it’ll be her.

“Uncooperative camels,” Karen tells him, scribbling notes into her phone.

“I love camels!” Danny announces before disappearing into the crowd, and Foggy thinks he should follow him but can’t find an excuse. 

He forgets the impulse as soon as he sees Matt loitering by the wassail table, cup in one hand and cane in the other. Matt looks _delicious_ , and Foggy regrets the thought as soon as he has it. He regrets letting Danny out of his sight, too, the moment Danny shows back up leading two camels over one of the official handler’s protests. 

A scattered round of applause sounds from the audience, and the actors whistle and cheer. Danny parks them at the edge of the stage and somehow convinces them to lie down. Camel-whisperer is not something Foggy would have guessed was on Danny’s resume, but why not? He’s definitely not going to ask where the hell Danny picked that one up.

Especially since Karen does it for him, the second Danny vaults over the fencing separating the temporary paddock from the square.

“Camel-racing is still a really big deal in Mongolia,” Danny says cheerfully, as if that’s all the explanation anyone needs. Once Karen realizes he and Colleen are honest-to-god tourists, and that they’re in Champlain because Foggy (accidentally) told everyone he knew how beautiful the town was, she latches on for a full interview and deputizes Foggy to keep Matt company.

“Sorry,” Foggy says, ladling himself a cup of wassail from the nearest simmering crockpot. “Karen wanted to trade friends for a few minutes.”

“Is the mayor’s new favorite animal tamer a lawyer, too?” Matt asks. He seems willing to let the awkwardness of this morning go, for which Foggy is grateful.

“Colleen’s a martial arts instructor, and Danny’s--” Foggy watches as Danny hitches up his shirt to show Karen the incredibly extensive sak yant tattoos covering his back and the impressive wave of gooseflesh that pebbles his skin as soon as the cold hits it. “--a human cartoon,” he finishes with a sigh. “Can you call someone a trustafarian if they had no idea how many zeroes were in their bank account until they turned twenty-four?”

“A client,” Matt surmises, with a there-and-gone-again grimace.

“One of my boss’s clients,” Foggy clarifies. “I think he’s kind of on the lam from her at the moment.” He looks around, expecting a hush to fall over the crowd as the nativity play begins. It doesn’t. No wonder the actors aren’t really bothering with lines, instead hamming it up with exaggerated pantomime. He locks eyes with Mrs. Outerbridge, and she smiles and waves. He waves back, then sees Matt’s drop-in from earlier. Speaking of being on the lam… “Are you still avoiding Frank? He’s heading this way.”

“I’m not _avoiding_ him,” Matt says testily.

“Of course not,” Foggy agrees, gently prying the empty cup from Matt’s clenched hand. “Here, let me get you a refill. You two can catch up.”

Matt’s hand, now free, curls around Foggy’s bicep instead. It’s a surprisingly firm grip for someone who was grudgingly tolerating his presence five seconds ago, and Foggy wants to lean into it.

“I don’t want a refill,” Matt tells him quietly, his head dipping toward Foggy’s ear. “I want--”

Foggy doesn’t get to find out what Matt wants, which is probably much less exciting than what Foggy hopes he wants, because Frank picks that moment to call out to him, his voice carrying even over the pronounced murmur of neighbors catching up and people admiring the real donkeys.

“Hey, you two,” Frank says, once he’s close enough to have a conversation at normal volume. Matt doesn’t let his hand drop, and Foggy wonders if he’s forgotten he’s leaning on Foggy, or if it’s only that he really doesn’t want that refill. “Maria about skinned me for not getting an RSVP to the party tonight. You’re coming, right, Red?” Frank’s eyes lock on the way Matt’s holding onto him, then flick away. “Plenty of space at the table if you want to bring someone, too.”

Foggy thinks of the reaction he’d get if he took off and left his parents to deal with Danny and Colleen and whatever spectacle Danny’s planning on turning his engagement into all by themselves on Christmas Eve. Skinning is liable to only be the beginning of it.

“Oh, ah, I have friends up from the city for the night,” Foggy says quickly.

“You’re eating with the Nelsons, then?” Frank asks Matt, who’s probably glaring daggers at one, the other, or both of them behind those glasses.

“Yes.” Matt’s voice is carefully modulated, and his fingers are digging into Foggy’s arm through his coat, and there’s a pink in Matt’s cheeks that Foggy doesn’t think is because of the cold. “I’m looking forward to it, quite a bit. Please give Maria my regrets.”

“No worries, we’ll bring the herd by before New Year’s,” Frank promises. “Lisa knit you the ugliest scarf I’ve ever seen in my life, but damn if it isn’t like having an angora rabbit wrapped around your neck. I didn’t even know they made yarn that soft.” He moves on to the next unknown guest on Maria’s list with a cheerful, “See you later!”

“Dinner’s at six,” Foggy tells Matt, trying to keep the stupid smile out of his voice. “No need to dress up, but I should warn you in advance that the eggnog’s like ninety-proof and my mom will try to talk you into having at least two glasses.”

“I don’t want to impose--” Matt starts.

“I’ll impose for both of us, then,” Karen says, joining them. “Assuming that’s really Daniel Rand over there giving a tai chi demo to the garden club?”

“Daniel Rand?” Matt echoes, lost, and Foggy winces.

“Well, I mean…” Foggy says.

“Daniel Rand, lost heir to the Rand Corporation? Daniel Rand, the Beatnik Billionaire?” Karen prompts. “Have you ever once in your entire life listened to a newspaper, Murdock?”

“Could you please, please keep it down?” Foggy pleads.

“That is such a yes,” Karen says, pumping her fist. Her eyes widen. “Oh my god. Daniel Rand took off his shirt for me and showed me all his tattoos. This is front-page news.”

“My mother will literally keel over and die if she realizes she’s about to serve cornish game hen and canned cranberry sauce to _that_ Danny Rand,” Foggy hisses, and Karen finally subsides.

“How do you know him?” Karen asks, instead. “And why does none of the news coverage ever talk about how hot he is?”

“Client,” Matt supplies, his tone clipped.

“Because he dresses like a hobo whenever he can get away with it,” Foggy says. The one time Danny really put his foot down with Joy and Ward was when Joy hired a stylist. If Danny can’t fight in it, he’s not wearing it, and it turned out Danny actively likes his hair like it is instead of the tousled mop being the product of benign neglect, which Foggy never would have guessed.

“I thought the Rands were with Hogarth, Chao & Benowitz,” Karen says, and Foggy really wishes she’d stop scribbling notes in her phone. There are no Rands, plural, anymore. Just Danny. Though maybe, Foggy thinks, that will change if Colleen says yes.

“Can this be off the record, please? It’s Christmas,” he asks. Karen gives him puppy-dog eyes, and he’s very proud of himself for not caving.

“Fine. Off the record,” Karen concedes, putting her phone away. “And it’s Christmas Eve.”

“He is with Hogarth, Chao & Benowitz,” Foggy tells her, more comfortable now. Matt’s hand is still around his arm, and Foggy tries to enjoy it around the inevitable conclusion that Matt’s affected precisely enough by Foggy’s presence to forget he’s attached to a human being and not a convenient hitching post.

“But you’re with Landman & Zack?” Karen asks. “Or did I hear your parents wrong?”

“I interned with them, and they did offer me a position afterwards, but I wound up with HC&B instead.”

“Because Landman & Zack are basically supervillains?” Karen hazards.

“I signed about fifteen different non-disclosure agreements that prevent me from agreeing with that assessment in public,” Foggy tells her, and Matt huffs a laugh, something Foggy wasn’t sure he was capable of. It’s a nice laugh, and Foggy wants to hear it again, but Karen is studying him now, her lips pursed and her eyes narrowed.

“So if I volunteered to drink as much eggnog as your mom wants to give me, I could get an exclusive on what attracted New York City’s richest adventurer to Champlain for the holidays?”

“Probably?” Foggy hedges. She’s wearing her press pass; Danny would have to be a lot more oblivious than he usually is not to have noticed that Karen’s a reporter. “I mean, I can’t provide or deny access. If he wants to tell you about how excited he is to be here, leading camels around and building snowmen, I’m not going to stop him.”

“He built a snowman?” Karen’s eyes go wide as saucers.

“An attempt was made,” Foggy says, and Matt snorts. “But yes, please, come for dinner, drink eggnog, make sure Matt shows up on time.”

“We’ll be there with bells on,” Karen promises, and Matt suddenly seems to realize he’s clinging to Foggy like a limpet. The release is abrupt, and Karen’s pale brows furrow at the way Matt puts a foot or so of distance between him and Foggy. Foggy shrugs, but he needs to tell his parents they’ve got another couple coming anyway. He presses Matt’s cup back into his hand.

“In case you change your mind about that refill,” Foggy says, then excuses himself. When he looks back, he catches Karen watching him with a deeper interest than he feels he warrants.

Foggy’s ears are still ringing from his mother’s attempts to convince him that they’ll never be able to feed everybody--he’s willing to believe they won’t spend the rest of the week living off tonight’s leftovers, but that’s as far as his credibility stretches--when Marci calls.

“Do you still have eyes on the package?” she asks.

“Grown adults, remember, Marci?” he says.

“Jeri dispatched Jessica with the prenup fifteen minutes ago.”

“Well, if she finds the real Danny and Colleen in his penthouse, please, don’t tell me. I’d prefer my impending axe-murder by shape-shifting alien imposters to be a surprise,” Foggy tells her.

“To your parents’ house.”

Foggy checks his watch. They’re not catching the train at this hour, and good luck getting on a plane as anything but luggage for the next week to ten days. 

“It’s an eight-hour drive in this weather, and it’s Christmas Eve.” He pauses. To the best of his knowledge, Jessica hasn’t been out of the city in a decade. “Does Jess even have a license?”

“Rental car, driven by the one person in existence Jessica can stand to be around for more than an hour,” Marci elaborates. “I can only assume they’re celebrating in the car, on the way.”

“Jeri knows email, fax machines, and certified mail are all things, right?” Foggy asks.

“None of which have the emotional force of being hand-delivered by personal minions,” Marci says sweetly. “And also the post office said no.”

“Am I fired?” Foggy sighs.

“Jeri actually said ‘thank god’ when I told her they were with you, like in a really genuinely relieved tone of voice?” Marci still sounds suspicious. “So if anyone’s going to get axe-murdered by shape-shifting alien clones, the smart money’s on me.”

“The smart money’s always on you,” Foggy says. Better to rip the bandaid off now and get it over with. “If you get stuck in one of those situations where there are two identical Jeris each claiming to be the real one, and you’re trying to figure out who’s telling the truth, tell them I gave the local press an exclusive on Danny’s snowman-building efforts.” 

“Oh my god,” Marci groans. “You didn’t. No, wait. This could be a good thing.” Foggy waits for a split-second while she makes up her mind. “Yes--it’s perfect. Get as much puff-piecery going on as you can. Invite all the reporters in that zip code. If we can raise Danny’s profile, he could be the new face of the company.” He can hear her wrinkling her nose at the plan, mentally testing the ramifications. “It doesn’t change anything on paper, of course, but politically it would give him a lot more clout, and he could leverage that image when it comes to new ventures. You can’t let Joy or Ward within twenty feet of reporters--watching them try to filter their little corporate-shark souls into something palatable for public consumption is deeply and sincerely painful.”

Foggy wants to make a half-hearted attempt to defend the siblings against her charge, but she’s not wrong, and she also doesn’t mean it as an insult. They’re the two people in that whole area code that Marci’s impressed by without the almost wistful follow-up admission that the world would be a better place if one of their yachts sank with them on it.

“Don’t make that face,” Marci says, “I can feel you making that face at me. It’s not their fault they were raised in the office and thought they could be fired for not meeting growth metrics until they were like, fourteen.”

“Oh my god,” Foggy says, because it’s that or laugh, and he’d feel bad for laughing.

“Oh, you think I’m kidding,” Marci purrs. “There’s a birthday card from Ward to _Director Meachum_ in the discovery for one of the first cases Jeri took for Rand Corp. ‘Director Meachum, happy birthday and many good quarters to come. Deepest respects, Ward.’ I think they thought the PAs their dad went through like kleenex were unsatisfactory older siblings or something.”

“That’s not--” Foggy chokes back a laugh. He shouldn’t. Whatever’s going on there, Joy and Ward were pretty clearly raised in a dysfunctional environment. Danny’s managed them just fine since Jeri conclusively proved to them and the company that Danny was, well, _really Danny_ , but then, Danny could make friends with a sea sponge if he had some idea of how to communicate with one and a decently-sized oxygen tank. “You’re being mean.”

“You love it,” Marci reminds him. “I’m just saying, don’t be surprised when Jess shows up on your porch, makes Danny sign a delivery form, and then drinks you out of house and home. And be nice to Luke, god knows what he’s already suffered in the past two hours trying to rent a car on Christmas Eve.”

“The more, the merrier,” Foggy says. “Thanks for the heads up, Marci.”

He intends to look up Karen’s articles online, get some sense of what he’s throwing Danny into, but instead he finds himself frantically googling appropriate hotels, motels, and B&Bs to stow Jessica and Luke in and then creeping on Matt’s miniscule web presence. Unsurprisingly, pretty much any place nearby and not a total dive is booked solid for the holidays. Surprisingly, Matt also went to Columbia.

“Son of a gun,” Foggy mutters. Matt graduated magna cum laude the same year as Foggy. How did they never run into each other? It’s not like Columbia’s law program is that big.

He gives in to temptation and runs Matt’s name through the search bar on the _Champlain Gazette_. They’d profile the hometown boy made good, he’s sure, and he’s right. He regrets it the second he sees the headline: “Law School Triumph Marred by Tragedy.” 

Instead of attending Matt’s graduation ceremony, Jack Murdock died in a mid-season hunting accident. Matt had come home for the first time since leaving for Columbia to bury his father, then gone back to graduate seven spots shy of top of their class. He’s the first blind student to graduate from the school with honors, never mind high honors. At least at the time the article was written, authorities hadn’t been able to find the party or parties responsible for Jack Murdock’s death; readers were exhorted to contact the park service or local police with any information.

Foggy clicks the next link without even really meaning to. That article informs him, in sad but very hopeful tones, that the nine-year-old boy injured pushing an elderly man out of traffic may yet make a full recovery. Matt came out of it with a broken arm, which was set without incident, and significant damage to his corneas from an unknown chemical slurry--initially mis-reported as road-salt slush--which was splashed into them during the accident. The slew of specialists consulting on the case were optimistic. The man he’d saved had suffered a few contusions, lacerations, and a hairline wrist fracture instead of certain death.

Matt’s a hometown hero twice over. Matt went blind saving somebody, at the age of nine. Matt lost his dad about this time of year, not so very long ago. Matt’s more than earned the right to be prickly around people trying to make him have fun and get into the holiday spirit, Foggy supposes. He feels guilty about badgering Matt into decorating the tree, but then again Matt hadn’t really seemed to mind until Foggy brought up the angel. Foggy hadn’t meant to stick his finger right in a half-healed wound, but he should have known better.

It’s almost six before he realizes it, and Foggy pulls Danny aside discreetly as they’re setting the table, to make sure he’s aware that Karen is a journalist.

“Do you think I shouldn’t have talked to her earlier?” Danny asks, frowning. “She seemed nice.”

“No,” Foggy says quickly, “I only wanted to double-check.” Karen did seem nice, but that’s not really any sort of guarantee, something practicing law has drilled into him. “You can do anything you’re comfortable with, just make sure anything you want to stay private is off the record.”

“Sure,” Danny agrees, looking at Colleen. She’s still in the kitchen, helping Foggy’s mom with a pie. “Thanks, Foggy. For everything--this whole trip means a lot to me.”

“De nada, buddy.” Foggy can’t help but feel a tiny twinge of envy at how happy they seem. But everybody’s got their parts to play in everybody else’s drama; his parents are probably looking at a certified billionaire and his martial arts master girlfriend and seeing Foggy’s zany boho friends. He puts down the last plate, straightens the silverware, and steps back to survey the table.

Foggy hasn’t been allowed to help with the cooking since the time he forgot to put sugar in the cranberry sauce back in 2010, but his mother’s even shorter than he is and his father’s colorblind, so decorating is usually his time to shine. Everything looks as nice as it’s going to, and he leaves Danny to fill the water glasses when the doorbell finally rings.

Karen has, as promised, delivered Matt. She jingles softly when she goes in for a hug, and Foggy laughs when he sees that she literally has bells on--one of her hair clips has a half-dozen tiny silver bells hanging from it. Matt hands over a bottle of sauvignon blanc, shifting his weight uncomfortably when their fingers brush. 

If Foggy didn’t know better, he’d think Matt was nervous. He’s practically hiding behind Karen, fingers plucking at the wristband on his cane and lips twisting. Foggy excuses himself to put the wine in the fridge and let Karen get Matt situated at the table. The house is warm, and there are so many strangers, and the bustle and smell of dinner cooking is everywhere--Foggy can see where it would be overwhelming. And it’s not like Matt was champing at the bit to eat with them in the first place. 

Instead Karen immediately starts peppering Danny with questions about the snowman, leaving Foggy to ask Matt if he’d like coffee, or eggnog, or a bottle of nyquil and a quiet place to sleep through the rest of the evening. Matt accepts a cup of coffee, and Colleen shows Karen the picture with the least embarrassing coal-dot smile, and Karen declares it a perfectly acceptable first attempt.

His parents stake out the head and foot of the table, and Karen bookends Danny and Colleen, leaving Foggy to take what he’d assumed would be her place on Matt’s left. He’s a little surprised when Matt doesn’t scooch away, but then there isn’t really a way to do it without being obvious about it. 

Foggy knows what’s coming and paces himself; the trick to surviving a holiday meal at his parents’ house is miniscule portions, because there’s somehow never an end to the number of sides, salads, desserts, and aperitifs being passed around the table. Colleen catches on quickly, between Foggy and bearing witness to the mountain of food his mother was making, and apparently Karen and Matt are past masters at this, which leaves Danny as the lone hapless victim with a growing pile of food on his plate and no room in his stomach.

“So, what did our new director of tourism show you to get you two all the way out here?” Karen asks, once there’s a lull in the proforma pleasantries about how everyone’s family is doing and work is going and what the weather will be like tomorrow.

Danny immediately starts flipping through Foggy’s photos, and Foggy starts panicking about what he might have captioned everything. Nothing too horrible, he’s sure, but some of his cousins’ humor modes split the difference between irony and sass, and he really hadn’t meant for anyone less familiar with him than them to see the album.

“Wow,” Karen laughs after about thirty seconds. “You really have no idea which trees are which, do you?” 

She’s grinning when she looks up from Danny’s phone, and Foggy flushes. He vaguely remembers using thirty or forty variants on ‘a different kind of tree’ to tag the landscape photos.

“City boy, guilty as charged,” he admits. “I can do nothing but throw myself on the mercy of the court and threaten to appeal due to this not meeting the statutory definition of exigent circumstances.”

“You have to fix this, Matt,” Karen tells him, and the way Matt jumps, Foggy can tell she’s kicked at his foot under the table. “He doesn’t know how to identify an aspen.”

“Is it really that easy, even when they don’t have leaves on them?” Colleen asks, examining the picture Karen’s on. Foggy shrugs. Trunk, branches, he assumes there are roots in the ground somewhere--it’s a tree. Beyond that, he’s lost.

“They have different bark--different colors and textures, I mean--and distinct patterns to their branch formation, trunk width, that sort of thing. And of course they tend to grow in different places, within their immediate environment,” Matt explains, lighting up.

Once he gets going, it’s hard to shut him up, and Foggy doesn’t want to try. Matt has Karen pull up tree after tree while he explains the basic differences in their presentation, life cycle, agricultural uses and environmental niches, what they’ll look like come summer, what they mean to local fauna. It’s an impromptu lecture, and Foggy looks up from it to catch his mom beaming at them all and his dad looking bemused but pleased as he helps himself to another round of creamed onions.

“That’s it,” Karen announces, after Matt winds down. “We have to take them hiking tomorrow.”

Foggy didn’t bring anything remotely hiking-oriented--his mother told him there’d be parties and he couldn’t embarrass them in front of their new neighbors, not that he’d be stomping around in the wilderness--but the bashful smile that slides across Matt’s face makes him wonder if there’s anywhere still open he can pick up at least appropriate boots. He doesn’t want to beg off, even though every ounce of reason tells him he really should. It would be precisely his luck to lose a toe to frostbite trying to impress a guy who won’t remember his name in a few weeks.

“I thought you were spending tomorrow with Ben and Doris?” Matt asks.

Karen stares at him. “Not the whole day, Matt. It’s their anniversary, too--they’re going to want _some_ time to themselves.” She glances at the rest of them and shrugs. “Ben’s my boss, at the paper. His wife slipped on some ice back around Thanksgiving, and her wrists are still giving her grief. I promised to help with the cooking and set-up in exchange for a plate and leftovers.”

“And also because he’s basically adopted you,” Matt laughs.

“He just worries about a young woman all alone in this cold, hard town,” Karen says, rolling her eyes but looking pleased all the same.

“Hiking sounds awesome,” Danny tells them, grinning. “Whenever you want to go, I’m free. Babe?”

Colleen nods. “Sure, I’m in.”

“I, unfortunately, forgot to pack anything more durable than sneakers,” Foggy apologizes. He’s flattered to see a tiny flicker of disappointment on Karen’s face--not enough that him bowing out has soured anything, but enough that it seems like she’s genuinely enjoying his company. “It sounds great, though. I’m sure you guys’ll have a blast.”

“Oh, you can borrow mine,” Foggy’s dad says. He catches Foggy’s look, completely misinterprets it, and shakes his head. “Brand new, still in the box, hand on the Bible. I bought ‘em when we first moved here and haven’t gotten around to hitting the trails yet. They can be a Christmas present.”

Foggy tamps down a grimace. He and his father wore the same size shoe for about a year and a half, when Foggy was in high school. Foggy would have an easier time convincing him that the moon landing was fake than that this is no longer the case. 

Karen looks at Foggy expectantly, and Matt’s got that smirk on his face, like he fully anticipates Foggy folding like an origami pattern. Which is exactly what Foggy does, because he can’t _not_ say yes to an afternoon of listening to Matt talk about forestry and trees and whatever else he wants to tell them about, especially with that incredibly kissable smirk on his ridiculously handsome face. And Foggy only wears a half-size up--he can put up with pinched toes for an hour. They’ll all be full of turkey and potatoes and pie tomorrow, it’s not like Matt will drag them up a mountain. How bad can it be?

“In that case,” Foggy says, “I’m in.”


	4. Chapter 4

Eventually Foggy’s mom believes them when they all say they couldn’t possibly eat another bite, and the five of them are shooed into the den so Foggy’s parents can clean up and put things away. Everyone except Matt tries to insist on helping out, but Foggy’s had decades at this point to understand the futility of it. 

His dad put himself through college washing dishes for one of the busiest diners in the borough and has no patience for amateur-hour at the sink, and his mom has very specific ideas about how to box up and parcel out leftovers. Beyond that, Foggy’s had the vaguely uncomfortable sense since high school that the kitchen after big get-togethers is somehow alone-time, just for them as a couple. 

Matt stands on the sidelines, pouring conciliatory glasses of wine for the vanquished, holding the bowl of it in his hand with the stem between his fingers so he can feel the weight of the liquid as he pours. Foggy’s taken again by how elegant Matt’s hands are, how deft and decisive his movements can be. It’s a life-goals vs. wife-goals moment, and he’s not sure where his carnal admiration for the aesthetics of it ends and his regret over his own butterfingers clumsiness begins. Then Matt is pressing a glass of wine into his hand, and Foggy loses his train of thought.

The conversation swirls around Danny’s impressions of the town, and Matt and Karen’s memories of growing up there, and the latest news out of the city. Foggy oh-so-smoothly asks where Matt went to law school, and he gets another dose of that smirk when Matt says, “Columbia.” like he can guess Foggy spent half an hour googling him and already knows the answer.

“Oh?” Foggy says, trying to sound surprised. _The burden of proof lies with the state, Your Honor._ It’s not like Matt knows for a fact that Foggy looked him up. “Me, too. Small world, huh? When’d you graduate?”

Matt tells him, and Foggy gives the obligatory second me-too, and it doesn’t occur to him until Karen’s shifting uncomfortably and it’s too late to take it back that this line of questioning is going to lead smack into Jack Murdock’s untimely death.

“You must’ve been one of the responsible citizens Columbia actually tries to recruit and spent most of your time in the library,” Foggy says, floundering for a way to pump the brakes. “I don’t remember ever seeing you at the parties or clubs.”

“Is that your way of saying you weren’t one of the responsible citizens Columbia tries to recruit?” Karen asks, seizing on the opportunity to steer the conversation into less fraught territory.

“Ah, yeah,” Foggy chuckles. “I was one of the well-camouflaged closet dumbasses they accidentally admit from time to time.”

Colleen scoffs. “That seems a little--”

“I was president of the craft beer club,” Foggy interrupts, grimacing. It’s not as bad as it sounds, but it was still pretty bad. If it hadn’t been for Marci’s relentless, semi-good-natured competition, in all likelihood he wouldn’t have buckled down enough to make the cum laude list. He hadn’t really been prepared for how much arguing with people it took to make the law work, or how unnerving it was to have so much riding on people buying what he was selling.

Matt’s lips are pursed, and he sips his wine. “The, uh, transformation of the murder-mystery society into the true-crime society…”

Foggy’s face turns scarlet, and he groans. “That was so not our fault! The ABVs for all our exhibition brews were clearly posted, and the tasting cups were the size of a thimble. Plus there was no call for the ultimate frisbee guys to escalate the situation like that--they didn’t have the quad reserved, the murder-mystery club did, and…”

He trails off when he realizes Danny and Karen are both staring at him, delighted, and Colleen is clearly reconsidering her previous categorization of him as a responsible adult.

“This was years ago,” he assures them. It had also been partially the wine club’s fault, since neither of them had considered the likely fallout of having events on the same night. “And we completely revamped how we handled tasting events as a response.”

“You made people promise to check themselves before they wrecked themselves and leave their solo cups at the door,” Matt laughs. “I don’t know that that counts as completely revamping things.”

“You came to one?” Foggy asks, dumbly happy at the thought. 

He’d wound up inordinately proud of the experimentation they’d done and accomplishments they’d made, for all that most of the people in the club had taken it about as seriously as anyone would expect. 

For a bunch of people who’d banded together to be collectively too intimidated by the serious clubs to try joining them but too extroverted to sit in their dorms and study seven days a week, they’d been amazingly productive. And seeing a bunch of hotshot classmates drunk and disorderly did wonders for a nervous law student’s case of imposter syndrome. In retrospect it wasn’t surprising how many of the students who joined as first-years had expanded into more serious and prestigious clubs within a semester or two.

“One,” Matt clarifies. “It wasn’t my scene.”

“Yeah, I guess I can kind of see that.” Meetings tended to be boisterous, enthusiastic, and very well-attended. Someone had once described it as like the mock trial club, but without the procedural rules to keep it from descending into trial by ordeal.

“I didn’t spend _every_ night in the library,” Matt protests.

“Let me guess,” Foggy says, rubbing his chin. “The Environmental Law Society? Outdoor Club?”

“Loquitur,” Matt tells him, flushing slightly. Foggy can see it, actually--the assurance, the self-possession, the confidence in Matt’s voice when he speaks. Whatever might come from Matt’s personality and natural bearing, he’s practiced it, polished the rough edges off, put in the work to produce the results.

“And that’s Latin at the table, Mr. Murdock,” Karen tells him firmly. Foggy gives her a sheepish grin; he really hadn’t meant to monopolize the conversation with law-school reminiscing.

“We’re not at the table,” Matt points out smugly, and she tosses a cork coaster at him so gently Foggy’s not sure how Matt even notices the impact through his sweater. The sweater that would bring out his eyes if he wasn’t wearing his glasses, and Foggy wonders who picked it out for him. Karen, most likely. Or maybe the selection was based on texture and fit, and the color suiting him is pure serendipity.

Matt puts the coaster down and sets his empty glass on top of it, and Danny produces a bottle he sneaked into the cart on their earlier grocery run when Foggy wasn’t looking and pours him a refill. Foggy offers his own glass as well, and Karen and Colleen don’t need much persuasion to have another glass, too. Danny grins at everyone, and if anyone was going to drop in unannounced on his parents on Christmas, Foggy’s glad it was Danny. The man’s comfortable anywhere everyone’s having a good time, and it’s infectious.

Colleen has just started explaining what goes into making a summer judo program for at-risk kids really _work_ when Danny reaches into the fruit bowl on the table, picks a couple of grapes off the bunch, and pops them into his mouth. Foggy’s shouting “No!” like he’s caught a dog with a chocolate bar before he even fully registers why, but he can tell he’s too late by the look of deeply confused horror that lands on Danny’s face like a mallard skidding on ice.

“It’s wax,” Foggy groans, face contorting in sympathy as Danny spits the masticated pieces of fake grape into a napkin and starts trying to rub the wax off his teeth. Foggy’s parents do their best to feed everyone who walks through the door, but in all the years he’s lived with them, they’ve never kept food anywhere but the kitchen and dining room, because that’s how you get ants. Having a big bowl of fruit randomly sitting on a table in the den isn’t something they’d do.

“Ew,” Danny says weakly, and Colleen pats his thigh comfortingly. He takes a closer look at the grapes. “Man, they don’t even really look real. What was I thinking?”

“It’s Christmas, you’ve had enough to drink that you get a pass,” Foggy assures him. Foggy’s mom uses her own grandmother’s eggnog recipe, and he’s pretty sure she was getting rum direct from the Navy by the barrel. It’s practically lethal.

Danny pokes at the grapes. “You don’t think your mom will be mad I tried to eat some of her decorations, do you?”

“I think if you mention it, she’ll probably try to source some real grapes and make you eat them, but it wouldn’t be out of anger,” Foggy says. “So maybe we’ll keep it on the DL for now, huh?”

“We haven’t even been here a day, and I’ve already got egg on my face,” Danny sighs.

“Honey, it’s Christmas,” Colleen tells him. “Everybody’s entitled to a faux pas or two.”

“It’s hardly the most embarrassing thing anyone in the room’s done on the holidays,” Karen says. “I mean, junior year, Matt showed up to school right before break with mistletoe on his belt buckle.”

Foggy can’t help a yelp of laughter at that, and Colleen smothers a groan.

“You didn’t!” she says. Matt seems infinitely too buttoned-up to have ever been a smart-ass teenage boy.

Matt’s cheeks turn pink, and he glares at her. “Karen!”

“Oh, don’t you _Karen_ me, buddy,” she laughs. She looks at Foggy. “When Mrs. McPherson yelled at him about it, he played dumb and said that I told him it was a miniature wreath. And she bought it.”

Matt’s blush deepens, creeping down his neck. “It’s not like you got in trouble over it,” he mutters.

“No, it was worse,” Karen says firmly. “She said she wasn’t angry with me, but she was extremely--”

“No,” Foggy laughs, knowing what’s coming.

“Yes,” Karen tells him, shaking her head. “--extremely _disappointed_ in me, Murdock. She _expected better_ of me. Meanwhile, you’re standing there with your lip wobbling like you might cry over it, and she’s looking at me like I’m the bad seed for tricking my blind boyfriend into delinquent behavior.”

“Oh, no,” Foggy gasps.

“Yeah, I’d still be telling that story too,” Colleen agrees, trying to keep a straight face.

Danny’s got his head cocked like a golden retriever. 

“Mistletoe?” Colleen leans in close and whispers something in his ear, and his eyebrows shoot up. “ _Oh_. Wow. That’s… that’s a move, right there.”

“I have apologized so many times for that--” Matt’s face must be on fire, and Foggy feels bad for him, he really does, but it’s hard not to watch him and Karen razz each other like this and not see how close they are.

“Once,” Karen corrects. “You apologized once. All the other times, you talked about apologizing but never actually did it.”

“Well, I’m sorry. So there, I’ve apologized twice.” Matt drains his glass. “At least I didn’t put out a breaking news alert that Santa had died in a drunk-sledding accident.”

It’s Karen’s turn to flush. “That was only on the Gazette’s homepage for like, ten minutes.” 

“I think it was more the way it made the six o’clock news that upset everyone’s kids,” Matt points out tartly.

She taps her fingernails against her glass, and Danny immediate offers a refill, which she accepts. “It was a newsroom joke, only it somehow wound up in the publication queue instead of hanging around in the drafts file.”

“It sounds funny, honestly,” Colleen says, and Karen waves her free hand.

“ _Thank_ you.” Karen lowers her voice. “It was hilarious. I’m still not sorry I wrote it. It just wasn’t meant for broad publication, especially in a forum where it could wind up in front of the town’s impressionable youth. It’s still in the Wayback Machine, if you want to look it up.”

Danny starts searching for it, and Colleen admits to getting banned for life from a big-box store downtown after spending half an afternoon arranging the motion-activated Santas so that they’d set each other off in a continuous and unending chain of tinny, squawking ho-ho-hos.

“They called my mom and made her pick me up, and then they showed her the security footage. She was so mad she told me I was shaming our ancestors, which is like… they converted to Catholicism in the 1920s? To the point where they had to flee the mainland during the revolution?” Colleen shrugs. “Pretty sure they don’t care what I do or don’t do with a bunch of battery-operated secular Christmas toys, provided I’m not lining the coffers of the Communist Party.” She finishes her wine and swirls the lees around in the bottom of the glass. “Not a sentiment she appreciated hearing right that second, I can tell you that.”

“Oh man,” Foggy says, cringing.

“Serious rebellious streak when I was a teen,” she tells him. He can totally see it, too. She’s never been one to suffer fools gladly, Danny excepted, and she’s not slow to step in when she thinks something is wrong, either.

Danny’s still picking wax out of his teeth when he looks at Foggy expectantly, and Foggy realizes it’s his turn. He gulps his wine.

“I, uh, I think the most embarrassing thing I’ve done during the holidays is lapse into a turkey coma and snore through everyone else opening presents,” he tells them apologetically. Usually he’s pretty firm on honesty being the best policy, but some things simply aren’t appropriate to share with billion-dollar clients and his parents’ neighbors, and this is one of them. His parents would kill him, and Jeri would reprimand him, and if Marci finds out, he will never, ever live it down. “Everybody cooing over their gifts and calling elderly relatives, and me in the background snoring like a buzzsaw.”

“Franklin Percy Nelson,” his mother says from the hall, “you’re my son, and I love you, but I’m not going to stand here and let you lie to guests under my roof on Christmas Eve.”

Foggy blinks, and his tongue turns to lead, and the world shudders on its axis.

“Uh, what?” 

He’s never done anything super-embarrassing around his parents on the holidays, and he gets a few seconds of peace when he thinks she must be referring to the cranberry sauce he ruined. Which was kind of embarrassing, now that he thinks about it, because the neighbors all suffered through every last bite of it and didn’t say anything about it until later.

She leans into the den, wiping her hands on a dishcloth, and points to Danny. “You just look up ‘stripper Santa’ and ‘novelty candy cane’ on that phone of yours, Danny. And don’t worry about the grapes. They were on sale and I’ve kind of regretted it since I bought them. It makes people think we leave food scattered around, and everyone knows that’s how you get ants.”

Possibly they’ve been a little bit louder than they meant to be, which is something that Foggy will have time to regret after he finishes dying of shame because _his mother knows about the charity burlesque show_.

“Wh--” He clears his throat and tries again. “Mom?”

“If I had to come up with something to tell your grandmother when all of her friends at the nursing home suddenly got real interested in when you’d be by to visit her next, you can tell your friends the truth,” his mother says firmly.

“ _What?_ ” Foggy sputters. Danny is already obediently searching youtube, and Foggy figures this must be a nightmare. He’s over-eaten, and fallen asleep on the couch, and this is a nightmare. His meemaw’s friends teasing her about her grandson in a tear-away Santa suit is nothing more than his tortured subconscious punishing him for going too hard on the lemon chiffon pie.

His mother gives him a withering look. “They’ve got the internet and nothing to do all day, Foggy, they’re worse than teenagers. Count yourself lucky she never figured out how to work twitter.”

She disappears back into the kitchen like a vengeful ghost vanishing after wreaking havoc, and Matt raises his eyebrows. 

“Want to try that one again?” he asks. “Stripper Santa?”

“Mistakes were made,” Foggy manages, but then Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me” starts playing on Danny’s phone, and it’s all downhill from there because Foggy shaking his ass really is out there for the world to see on the internet.

“Oh my god,” Colleen laughs.

Karen tries to look at the phone over her shoulder, and Danny abruptly realizes that the flatscreen on the wall is a smart tv. It’s the work of a minute to get the phone and the tv talking to each other, and Foggy wants to stuff himself under the sofa cushions and never come out. At least Matt can’t see Foggy’s undergrad-era Fabio-hair.

“It was a benefit show, to buy toys and games for the children’s hospital,” he protests. “And I didn’t know burlesque wasn’t just a term for fancy stripping until law school, or I’d have been up there doing stage magic in a Santa suit instead.”

He also hadn’t thought anyone would bother keeping the video for more than the month or two it would take to show everyone who hadn’t made it to the performance. Storage hadn’t been cheap back then, and as uses for it went, he likes to think him in his underwear ranked pretty low on the totem pole.

Karen blinks when the coat comes off. “Woof.”

Foggy twitches. He doesn’t look like that anymore. 

“False advertising,” he says quickly, pouring himself another glass of wine. “That’s the result of giving up carbs and spending all my free time in the gym for an entire semester, and it was not worth it.”

“It looks like the audience disagrees,” Colleen counters, and Foggy notices for the first time how many wads of cash are flying into the hats and Santa sacks being passed around the audience for donations. He’d barely been able to see the front row when he’d been on stage; the lights had been in his eyes, and it had taken half his concentration to keep that damn hat out of his face.

“The candy cane-striped pasties are a nice touch,” Danny offers.

“Well, the girls had to wear them, so it seemed only fair…” Plus it had kept the inside of the coat from chafing him raw, but it turns out that, even under the circumstances, there’s still such a thing as too much information.

Danny winces when the twenty-year-old Foggy on the screen does a particularly egregious drop and slide.

“Kneepads, buddy,” Foggy tells him, and Danny relaxes.

Karen’s kept up a running sotto voce descriptive-services-for-the-blind commentary for Matt, but she stops when they get to the part where Foggy rips off his pants with a flourish to reveal the tiny, red, satin-finish boxer-briefs underneath. The audience loses it, cheering and hooting, and Foggy remembers being deeply proud of that response at the time. 

He’s still a little proud of it, if he’s being honest with himself. He worked his ass off on the routine--everyone in the show did--and he gave it everything he had, and they raised a lot of money for a really good cause. He remembers how everyone turned into a blubbering mess when they saw how much the stuff they passed out to the kids stuck in the hospital over the holidays meant to them--not just the children, but their whole families. Taking his clothes off in public is arguably the first thing Foggy ever did that made a big difference in anyone else’s life, which is probably classic him. 

It’s just that this whole episode belongs locked in a time capsule along with half the other stuff he did in college, before he somehow turned into a guy people trusted with their futures without needing a lot of convincing first.

Danny’s got a thoughtful look on his face that Foggy’s going to regret humoring when he says, “Snaps?”

“Velcro. Sewn in where the seams would be,” Foggy explains. It hits him what the finale of the routine’s going to look like, and he laughs nervously. “I think we’ve all seen enough to get the point, right?”

Colleen bats his hand away from the phone as the novelty candy cane starts being prominently featured, and Karen covers her mouth with her hand.

“You were not kidding around with this,” she says, and then a girl in a sexy elf costume shimmies up a nearby stripper pole with a bright red coal bucket. The Flash Dance finish sees him being doused in big glittery cellophane snowflakes while doing one final pelvic thrust with the candy cane, and Foggy recalls thinking even at the time that it might have been a bit much.

“I was following a drag king with a Green Arrow routine and the stated goal of ‘not a dry pair of undies left in the house,’” Foggy tells her, as if that makes it any better. “It was go big or go home.”

“Green Arrow?” Matt asks.

“You know, that show?” Foggy says. A blank look is his response, and he tries again. “Archer vigilante goes around taking out scumbags? Like Robin Hood but sexy? Single-handedly put the WB back on the map? There’s a movie coming out in February?”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Matt says, raising his hands in surrender.

Then the deluge of snowflakes hits, and it’s over, and Foggy can try to salvage his reputation.

“How’d you talk Marci into that costume?” Danny asks, as the girl who definitely isn’t Marci lowers herself daintily back to the stage and they take a bow and skip behind the curtains.

“Ha!” Foggy snorts, trying to imagine the size of the bribe it would have taken. Not that Marci wouldn’t wear something like that, but she certainly wouldn’t have done it at someone else’s behest. “I didn’t meet Marci until law school. That’s Liz--we dated for a while in college. The whole thing was her idea, now that I think about it.”

Danny kills the feed, and Colleen raises an eyebrow. “Someone’s got a type.”

“I do not have a type.” _Hot, blonde, and way smarter than me_ , he thinks. He’d be an idiot not to chase that ring if he’s got a hope of catching it, but he’d be up a creek without a paddle if that was what it took to get his notice. “It’s a coincidence, that’s all.”

Literally--he’d only approached Marci in the first place because he’d thought Liz had somehow wound up at a party at Columbia, of all places. He’d panicked and forged ahead when Marci turned around and he’d realized his mistake. Marci had been impressed enough by his confidence to let him show off his humor, and they’d struck up something of an alliance.

“What’s Jeri always saying? Twice is a coincidence,” Danny laughs. “Three times is a pattern.”

Foggy gives him a blank look. “Three times?”

“Liz, Marci, Trish--”

“Trish?” Foggy echoes. “Are you kidding me? Trish is… we’re just friends.”

Trish is so far out of his league that it never occurred to him to bother making a pass at her, even though she is, yes, hot, blonde, and way smarter than him. And that’s before the part where she’s used the firm’s services a few times, and the part where no one would ever find his body once Jessica was through with him, and the part where she’s never shown a lick of romantic interest in him. They are very, very definitely just friends.

“You two have left the last four office parties together,” Colleen points out, and Foggy has no idea how she knows that, because he didn’t consciously know it until she pointed it out.

“We live in the same direction. I walk her home, on my way home, because we are _friends_ ,” Foggy groans. 

And also because Jessica invites herself half the time, and there’s nothing like a quiet evening stroll through Hell’s Kitchen in the company of a walking, talking excessive-force complaint. Foggy couldn’t intimidate a brownie troop, but Jessica’s got a don’t-screw-with-me field five blocks wide. He’ll never forget the time someone actually powered through it, tried anyway, and Jess had brought it to a screeching halt by unsnapping her holster at the guy. It had only been a taser, but still. One quick “Oh, Jesus.” later, and the guy had beaten a hasty retreat back into the shadows and disappeared in a frantic patter of running feet.

“Trish… ?” Karen ventures, eyebrows raised and a hopeful look on her face.

“Walker,” Foggy confirms, and she claps her hands in glee.

“Oh my god!” Karen squeals. “What’s she like? She seems great. Is she great? Tell me she’s great.”

“Be advised, you’re addressing a huge _Trish Talk_ fan,” Matt says. He’s toying with his empty glass, a slightly shell-shocked expression on his face, and Foggy tries to remember exactly what Karen was highlighting about the video when she described it to Matt. Or maybe it’s only that it’s been a long day and an even longer evening.

“She’s been through a lot, and it’s given her a unique perspective,” Foggy says carefully. He’s parroting the PR, sure, but it’s the most sincere PR-speak he’s ever come across. Whoever got assigned to the show really believes in what Trish is trying to accomplish with it. “She’s funny, she’s warm, and she really does care. She’s a pretty amazing person.”

“I grew up watching _It’s Patsy!_ ,” Karen confesses. “Favorite show, hands down. It’s hard seeing reruns now, knowing everything that was going on with her mom behind the scenes during filming, but at the time... it really meant a lot to me. I had no idea she’d even decided to do a radio show until last year, and I burned through the whole backlog in one weekend once I found out.”

It’s not until Colleen yawns and Danny leans on her shoulder that Foggy realizes how late it’s getting. He tries to track back through how many glasses of wine and eggnog Karen’s had, to figure out how insistent he should be about making up spare beds for them. He thinks she managed to dodge his mother earlier, in spite of her initial promise. It’s just down to Matt’s conservative after-dinner glass of wine and Danny’s liberal refills, which haven’t been an issue since they killed the bottle a while ago. She should be fine, if she’s feeling up to it.

Karen yawns like it’s catching, then looks at her phone. “Oh, man. Ben and Doris are expecting me at the crack of dawn. We should get going, Matt.”

Matt makes a disappointed noise that sounds sincere, and Foggy’s heart flutters.

“Um.” Karen flips through a calendar app. “Does two o’clock work for everyone, tomorrow? We’ll pick you up from here and head out to Lookout Rock?”

Danny and Colleen glance at Foggy; it’s not like they’ve discussed the schedule with his parents.

“Earlier also works,” Foggy says, shrugging. “The main meal should be wrapped up by one, and the party--to which you’re both invited, of course--doesn’t get started until seven.”

Karen hugs them all on her way out, and Matt settles for handshakes all around, which of course Danny uses to pull him into a back-slapping hug anyway.

Foggy says good-night to Danny and Colleen, then heads back to his own room to find a pristine box of hiking boots at the foot of his bed. He tries them on, and they’re stiff but sturdy, and roomy enough that he thinks maybe--just maybe--he can get out of this without too many blisters.


	5. Chapter 5

The next morning sees Foggy turfed out of bed at the ungodly hour of eight am, which seems deeply unfair, and it only gets more unfair when he sees Colleen and Danny in the living room, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and looking like they’ve been up for hours already.

“I need you to run this up to the Millers,” his mother says, shoving a blueberry pie into his hands as soon as he’s dressed. “One of their grandbabies pulled the table runner off the sideboard, and everything went with it. She can clean up the mess or bake a new pie but not both, and she’s got company coming.”

“I--” Foggy has no idea who the Millers are or where to find them. “Sure.”

His dad texts him the address, and Foggy saddles up while Colleen and Danny get started on a second, better snowman.

“I watched some tutorials last night,” Danny says, rubbing his gloved hands together. “It’s going to be perfect this time.”

“Danny, it’s a snowman,” Foggy sighs. “The point is to have fun building it.”

Danny’s got the look on his face that usually precedes a grudge-match or some inadvisable outburst of parkour, though, and Foggy knows it’s a lost cause. Danny’s going to achieve godhood and wrest a new Adam from the snow or get frostbite trying. Foggy waves at Colleen, who’s half helping and half recording it for, he assumes, either posterity or to confuse the hell out of Joy and Ward. Foggy can already hear Joy saying, “But what do you _do_ with it? Is it decorative? Can you monetize it?”

Colleen waves back with a big grin on her face.

The Millers are surprised by the pie, and then the Millers are making a big to-do out of his mother sending him all this way with a pie, and how _generous_ , can you believe it, Mrs. Nelson sent over a pie just like that? It turns out Mrs. Miller asked Foggy’s mom for a pie about the same way Foggy invited Danny and Colleen to stay with them.

The upshot is that Foggy can’t weasel out of accepting the reciprocal gift of two bottles of wine, an enormous fruitcake, and a pair of properly-wrapped presents, which they’re to think nothing of because apparently somebody left them behind at the last exchange down at the fellowship hall.

“This way there’ll be something under the tree for that nice young couple you invited,” Mr. Miller says, as he helps Foggy carry everything back out to the car. “Lord knows nobody around here will miss them.”

There are more kids than Foggy can count, plus a couple of big fluffy dogs wearing snow booties, all tearing around the back yard. Mrs. Outerbridge is supervising in the most hands-off way imaginable and bouncing a two-year-old on her hip--it turns out she’s Mrs. Miller’s youngest cousin. When she sees him, she raises her hot cocoa in a toast, smiles, and winks. Foggy mentally compares the scene here to what she’s described at home. 

The kids are flinging handfuls of snow at each other and shrieking whenever one hits its target, and the dogs are having the time of their life, and even with the chaos of the spilled sideboard, everyone seems to be overflowing with holiday cheer. Small wonder she’s here this morning instead of there. It’s a small reminder, as if Foggy needed it with Commissioner Cheatsalot running around, that divorce can be the lesser of two evils. After one particularly ear-splitting scream--the result of cold slush running down the inside of someone’s coat, which is followed by a swift reprisal--Mr. Miller shakes his head fondly.

“The thing nobody ever tells you about remarrying at this age is that you’re somehow tripling your guest list instead of doubling it.”

He claps Foggy on the back and wishes him a merry Christmas, and Foggy looks at the pile on the passenger seat and feels like he’s been snookered. The fruitcake is two pounds if it’s an ounce, and Foggy thinks his parents’ table might collapse if he adds one more thing to it.

Foggy takes the scenic route back, and he isn’t looking for an excuse to drop in on Matt--that would be dumb, he’s got maybe another forty-eight hours in the same town as Matt and that’s it. It’s only that he’s wondering if maybe Matt would like a pound or two of surprise fruitcake, and some company, because it’s Christmas. 

Which is also dumb, Foggy thinks, because Matt not telling Foggy his plans is not at all the same thing as Matt not having any plans. Half the town’s been involved in a far-reaching conspiracy to fill up Matt’s dance card; the odds of everybody overlooking Christmas Day are low. Foggy’s so wrapped up in not looking for an excuse to drop in on Matt that he doesn’t notice the cop car behind him until it fires up the lights and gives him a split-second blast of the sirens.

“It’s _Christmas_ ,” Foggy mutters to himself, pulling out his license and hoping he doesn’t have to go digging through the glove box for the registration. He has no idea why he got pulled over. He can’t have been speeding, because he’s been driving like a grandma since he got here on account of not quite trusting himself to keep the SUV out of a ditch.

He rolls down the window and sees a familiar face under the wide-brimmed hat. “Merry Christmas, Frank.”

At least the stop is unlikely to end with him in cuffs and cooling his heels down at the station, whatever it was initially for.

“Foggy,” Frank says, his eyes flicking to the passenger seat. “Millers got you too, huh?”

“Yup. It’s okay, though--I trojan-horsed a pie they didn’t technically ask for into their house as revenge,” Foggy tells him with a forced smile. He’d just assumed, based on his mother saying they needed a pie, that they had in fact needed a pie. How foolish of him.

“The gals around here and their baking,” Frank says, shaking his head. “The way Maria explained it when I moved back, it’s like the Hatfields and the McCoys, but with butter instead of bullets.”

“No chance of you taking it off my hands, is there?” Foggy asks.

“I’d never hear the end of it, and the station’s already getting it from both sides.” Frank’s eyes narrow. “I bet Matt could use it, though. He gets a lot of mileage out of never being able to eat something all by himself.”

“We’re going hiking later,” Foggy tells him. “I could sneak it into Karen’s truck and leave it for him. You guys want to come?”

Frank barks a laugh. “Two kids that age and another on the way? Takes an hour to get ‘em out of the house, never mind into the woods. Thanks, though. I’m guessing you didn’t know your tag’s expired?”

“Huh.” Foggy’s parents are usually a lot better about their paperwork than that. He hadn’t even thought to check. “No, I didn’t. I’ll let my dad know as soon as I get home.”

“It’s only by a month,” Frank says, waving it off, “but your rear passenger tire’s looking kinda iffy, too--that’s why I stopped you.”

Foggy does his best, which is not very good, to help while Frank roots around in the SUV’s emergency kit and then his cruiser’s kit. The tire in question’s pressure is precipitously low. Frank can’t find any evidence of a puncture, and he sets about pumping it up with the miniature compressor he found in the back of the SUV.

“You can’t be too careful, this time of year,” Frank says, over the noise. “We lost Maria’s ma to an accident on this stretch a few years back, and she always drove like she was trying to give a schoolmarm road-rage.”

Foggy fumbles his way through a series of condolences, which Frank thanks him for.

“Besides, Karen would never forgive me if I let the first person to get Matt out of his shell on Christmas wind up stranded on the side of the road on my watch,” Frank says as he’s packing everything back up. “Matt’s a great guy, but keeping him from disappearing into his own head this time of year’s harder than getting a pregnant badger out from under Mrs. McPherson’s porch. Whatever it is you’re doing, keep it up.”

“Glad to be of service,” Foggy laughs. It sounds unnecessarily nervous, even to his own ears. It’s not likely anything to do with him, not really, but it’s flattering that Karen thinks so and that Frank finds it credible. “But I’d guess if anyone has a right to not get into the holidays, it’s him. Didn’t his dad…?”

“Yeah,” Frank sighs. He puts his hands on his hips and looks out over the snow-covered fields surrounding them like they’ve got the answers. “Jack Murdock was a helluva guy. So far as I could tell, my dad respected a grand total of three people in this life: my mom, the Pope, and Jack Murdock.” Frank shakes his head, a rueful smile on his lips. “He was a lot like Matt, in all the ways that really count. But man, they butted heads like nobody’s business.”

“Yeah, I hear that,” Foggy says quietly. Things are good with his dad now, but there was a time when they’d gone whole months without talking to each other except to argue about the shop. And neither Foggy nor his dad have that quiet, steely dedication that’s so evident in Matt whenever he’s concentrating on something.

“When Matt went blind, Jack seemed to think that was that, but the place he packed him off to for middle school’s unofficial motto seems to be ‘Anything you can do, I can do better.’ Headmaster’s a real old-school hardass,” Frank continues. “I guess he came up when being blind meant you basically got warehoused until you had the good grace to die, and like hell that was happening to any of his kids. Matt still keeps in touch with him and some of the other students--one’s a chef with his own restaurant now, and another’s supporting herself off her artwork. Matt graduated with honors from a top-notch law school, and he’s somehow not the most impressive kid that place has turned out. I always figured he and Jack would hammer things out when Matt found a way back into forestry, but…”

“They never got the chance,” Foggy finishes, his voice soft. He can’t imagine what that must have been like for Matt.

“No,” Frank agrees heavily. “I wondered where Matt would wind up with that fancypants degree of his, but it was like the fight went out of him for a couple years there. By the time he was ready to kick ass and take names again, he was sorting deeds and executing wills and drawing up papers for ninety percent of the town, so he was kind of stuck here unless he wanted to be personally responsible for everybody going back to settling up with duels in the town square.”

“Baked goods at ten paces,” Foggy says. They’ve definitely had clients where it was either sue each other into oblivion or beat each other to death in the locker room at the club, and Foggy’s not entirely sure the one precluded the other. It makes sense that Matt wouldn’t be able to abandon the town, if it needed him. Which it does, just like Foggy’s clients need him, which is one of the many reasons that getting sappy over Matt is a bad idea. 

“You sure I can’t at least offload the wine on you?” he asks Frank. “I mean, you did spend part of your Christmas making sure I don’t wind up trying and failing to change a tire knee-deep in snow later on.”

“All part of a day’s work,” Frank says. “And besides, I’m on the wagon until Maria’s due date. House rules--if she can’t drink, I can’t drink.”

“Fair enough,” Foggy says. “Merry Christmas, Frank.” 

He means it a lot more than he did earlier.

“Merry Christmas to you, too, Foggy,” Frank says. “Be sure not to let Matt wriggle out of that fruitcake, when you see him. He could talk the spots off a cheetah.”

“He’s not the only one who went to law school,” Foggy assures him.

The drive home goes quickly, and Foggy checks the tire again once he gets there. It’s fine, but then tires don’t go flat again that fast unless there’s something seriously wrong. He’d have made it back from the Millers’ on the back of a tow truck, in that case. 

His mother isn’t best pleased by the armload Foggy drags into the house with him, but she relents as soon as he tells her the fruitcake’s for Matt and the presents are for Colleen and Danny. She sticks the wine in the fridge to chill for the party later and excavates a place for the gifts under the tree, inscribing the gift tags with “From Santa.”

Danny and Colleen have constructed a small snow army in the front yard, and Foggy can tell at a glance whose work each one is. Danny has yet to master the art of getting them to smile right, and Colleen has moved on to making snow-elves and snowwomen.

It’s the most idyllic thing he’s ever experienced, right up until he gets a call from Marci.

“Have you heard from Jessica and Luke yet?” she asks.

“Merry Christmas, Marci,” he says, because he can’t not. The prolonged groan of disgust he gets in response is more heartwarming than it should be. “No, but I can’t imagine Luke driving through the night to get a prenup here, and wherever they got a room, it wasn’t anywhere close.”

“Has he proposed yet?” Marci asks. “Was it revoltingly romantic?”

“I don’t know, because I’m not a babysitter,” Foggy tells her, “but I don’t think so. They’re just being normal.”

Foggy imagines a lot more whooping and crying and exuberance, if Danny had gone through with it already. He imagines they’d be smiling non-stop, if Danny had gone through with it.

“Foggy-bear.”

“Normal for them,” Foggy amends, because yes, she’s right, Danny’s normal is anybody else’s midlife crisis.

“Well, text me when they get there,” Marci huffs, and Foggy smiles.

“Marci Stahl, are you _worried_?” he crows. Of all the people no one needs to worry about, it’s Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, especially if they’re together.

“I am _concerned_ , about _colleagues_ , in a _professional capacity_ ,” Marci says, her tone frosty. “And if you ever tell anyone, they’re not going to believe you and also I will end you.”

Foggy laughs at that, though he supposes she’s not entirely wrong--she wouldn’t be calling him to check if they were answering their phones. Then again, if he was in their shoes he wouldn’t be picking up for HC&B at large, either. Jessica doesn’t have anyone but Trish, but with Luke’s giant extended family sprawled across half of Harlem, Foggy can’t imagine the pair of them didn’t have plans today. He’s sure Jeri’s made it worth their while, but that only goes so far.

“I will call you the second I hear from either of them, and I’ll put you on speakerphone as soon as they show up so you can hear they’re okay for yourself,” he promises, saccharine sweet.

“That’s it,” she snaps. “The whole theoretical house, plus fake alimony.”

“I love you too,” Foggy says, and she scoffs. He barely hears the ‘Merry Christmas’ she says under her breath before she hangs up on him.

Lunch is a comparatively sedate affair, with Foggy’s dad carving the turkey and Foggy’s mom cutting the pie. There’s a parade on tv in the background, and the three of them have the excuse of the afternoon’s hike when Foggy’s mom offers seconds. She’s not pushing it, though--the big event will be the party tonight and leftovers tomorrow. Foggy’s going to have some juggling to do on the train ride home, unless he can hitch a ride back with Danny and Colleen, in which case all three of them can do the juggling together on a chartered plane, or however Danny got the two of them up to Champlain.

All in all, Foggy’s feeling deeply optimistic when Karen knocks on the door. He successfully slips the fruitcake into her back seat, and he’s very pleased with himself for thinking of doing the gift tag in Braille. Hopefully Matt will think it’s cute instead of not being able to read it; Foggy was careful, but he’s never tried to emboss something in another alphabet before.

Matt’s looking more self-possessed and smug than Foggy would like after last night’s blushing bachelor routine. It stands to reason, though--they’re in Matt’s element now. As expected, he goes easy on them. Given the wattage in the smirk, Foggy’s not sure what he’d be in for if Karen weren’t there keeping Matt honest and periodically reminding him that she’s been up since six making the ham she had three helpings of. Doris apparently worries that Karen’s been living off black coffee and vending machine granola bars.

“Ben’s been a reporter since he was old enough to walk a beat,” Karen says, grimacing. “She’s convinced he’s taught me all his bad habits along with how to fact-check a source and run down the real owners of shell corporations.”

With Karen there, the hike is an objectively gentle stroll through the woods. Unfortunately, Foggy’s not sure if skimping on the socks to make up for the boots being too small has made the problem better or worse, but he’s crystal clear on this having been a _terrible_ idea. He’d have been better off in his sneakers. Heck, he’d have probably been better off in his wingtips.

Twenty minutes into the hike, Matt is glowing and chattering happily about the area’s history and ecosystem as Karen describes what’s visible, Danny and Colleen are enthralled, and Foggy’s trying to grin and bear it. 

The thing of it is that this would be an absolutely perfect afternoon if it weren’t for his damn feet. Matt’s enthralling as a speaker, and he clearly loves his subject. Karen’s having a good time. Colleen and Danny are holding hands and looking around at the landscape like they’ve somehow found themselves in a living museum. Any time Foggy can forget about the blisters forming on his heels and at least five of his toes, he’s enjoying himself more than he has in recent memory. It’s only that it’s becoming harder to do that with every step.

Eventually they get a visual on Lookout Rock. Foggy’s sure the view will be breathtaking, but he just can’t. At least, not if he wants to have a prayer of making it back to the car without sticking his feet in a snowdrift to numb them. He parks himself on a fallen tree and waves the rest of them on ahead.

“Too much time behind a desk,” he says, trying not to wince. “Or too much pie. Take your pick.”

Karen and Matt confer briefly, and Danny and Colleen take the moment to look around like kids in a candy store. Foggy does the same, now that he’s off his feet. It’s a Central Park that never has to give way to a wilderness of asphalt and electricity, and the silence is like a living thing. Karen leads them on ahead, and Matt settles on the tree next to Foggy.

“We won’t be long,” Danny calls back, and Foggy waves.

“I forgot how many miles it takes to break in a new pair of boots when you don’t know how to walk in them,” Matt says apologetically.

“That obvious, huh?” Foggy sighs. 

“Well, it was either that or you twisted both ankles and for some reason decided not to say anything,” Matt tells him with a wry smile. “You’ve been limping something fierce.”

Foggy thinks back and grimaces. Danny and Colleen have been asking question after question; Foggy had been so focused on trying not to cause himself any extra pain that he’d just been absorbing the answers and the landscape. There hadn’t been any mental energy left over to engage more actively. Meanwhile, Matt’s been listening to his gait get choppier and less firm.

“My dad and I haven’t worn the same shoe size since I graduated high school,” Foggy admits. “They’re a tick too small, on top of not being broken in.”

Matt’s eyebrows climb, practically reaching his hairline. “You really didn’t have to come. I’m sorry we badgered you into it.”

“No, I wanted to,” Foggy says quickly. “It’s been great.”

“You’re shivering, and I imagine your feet are two giant, contiguous blisters,” Matt says, almost to himself. “But it’s been great.”

Which isn’t untrue--now that Foggy’s not moving, he’s starting to feel how cold he is--but it also isn’t the overly-polite fib Matt clearly thinks it is.

“Those things aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive,” Foggy points out, examining Matt’s face in profile. The late afternoon sun is bathing his face in a honey-gold light. Between that and the flush of the light exercise, he’s heart-stoppingly beautiful. “Plus, you know, there’s the company.”

Matt bites his lip, and Foggy hasn’t wanted to kiss someone this badly in years.

“Foggy, I--” Matt breaks off and looks away.

_\--am straight, and would appreciate it if you’d stop hitting on me, and also I know you’re trying to fob a fruitcake off on me and nothing doing, mister_ , Foggy finishes mentally.

“Matt, it’s fi--” Foggy’s awkward reassurance is cut off when Matt kisses him, and it’s so gentle and brief that Foggy’s first, wild thought is that Matt didn’t mean to, that Matt had simply turned his head and misjudged the distance between them. Then Matt’s cheeks are turning red, and he’s stammering an apology.

“Matt, shh, it’s okay,” Foggy soothes, then kisses him when that doesn’t really work. He cups Matt’s jaw and kisses him like he means it, and Matt leans into it, hungry, and Foggy can’t help the soft noise he makes when Matt’s fingers tangle in his hair. He knew there was a reason he kept it as long as Jeri would let him get away with, and that reason turns out to be the way Matt responds to that noise, the way Matt’s fingers tighten as he ravages Foggy’s mouth. 

It feels like hours, before they come up for air. It feels like seconds, but Foggy’s lips are tender and raw from kissing him. It’s likely only been a minute or two. Foggy’s not shivering anymore. Matt isn’t letting go of his hair.

“You’re a _very_ good kisser, Mr. Murdock,” Foggy breathes.

Matt laughs, and it’s warm against the skin of Foggy’s throat. “You’re, uh, you’re not so bad yourself, Mr. Nelson.”

It’s entirely too soon when a cleared throat from slightly up-trail alerts them to the fact that they have an audience. Karen is chewing on her lip and tapping her phone like they’ve made her late for an appointment.

“Okay, lovebirds,” she says. “One of you is going to have to go tell Daniel Rand and his fiancée that if they bang on that rock, they’re going to get frostbite in places you really, really don’t want it and also be clearly visible for miles.”


	6. Chapter 6

“Fiancée?” Foggy asks, the gears of his brain finally catching. This would be pretty much the perfect moment, if Danny was going to go through with it.

“Newly-minted,” Karen confirms. “I decided to give you two some privacy and ran smack into that.”

“I’ll go,” Matt says immediately. The second Foggy puts weight back on his feet, he’s extremely grateful to Matt for volunteering. Then it occurs to Foggy that there are more tactful ways to handle this, and he checks to see if he has any bars.

“Hang on a second,” Foggy says, and he’s vaguely surprised when Danny picks up for him.

“As your legal counsel, I’m begging you to not involve me in bailing you two out on public indecency charges on Christmas,” Foggy blurts.

“I, uh.” Foggy can hear snow crunching on the other end, and what sounds suspiciously like a zipper. “We weren’t. Doing anything, I mean.”

“Then it won’t be a big imposition to continue not doing anything, right?” Foggy asks brightly.

“Uh…”

“I’m asking you to wait the hour it’ll take to get you back to locking doors and closing blinds, not join a monastery,” Foggy points out.

“Fine,” Colleen huffs, too close to the mouthpiece, and Foggy hopes they at least stopped kissing long enough to listen to him.

They’re disheveled and can’t keep their hands off each other on the hike back down, but Foggy raining on their exhibitionism parade doesn’t seem to have dampened the moment. Foggy’s torn between being in significant pain even around leaning heavily on Matt and being delirious at the fact that he gets to basically climb Matt without concealing ulterior motives. 

Matt kissed him. 

Matt seemed really into kissing him. 

Kissing Matt is even better than Foggy’s been dreaming it would be.

The drive back to town is spent in dazed, happy silence. Matt promises to swing back for the party later, and Foggy feels like he’s limping on a cloud as he hobbles back into the house. Colleen and Danny practically vanish in a puff of smoke, and Foggy holes up in the bathroom for the next half hour to deal with the mess he’s made of his feet. He doesn’t come back down to earth until he has to get the first boot off, and that hurts enough to finally knock some of the endorphins out of his system.

Foggy knows better than to pop the blisters. He does. But they’re so big that the thought of them bursting unexpectedly inside a shoe is stomach-churning. He lances them carefully, drains them, and uses up his parents’ decades-old collection of mammoth band-aids from the variety packs they always buy even though they only ever use the medium-sized ones. It’s a move that justifies their hoarding, and he’s in for at least a week of I-told-you-sos. 

Foggy’s in the process of figuring out whether he can tolerate his sneakers after all that, or if he’ll be attending the party in slippers, when he gets a call from an unknown number.

“Foggy Nelson’s phone, Foggy Nelson speaking,” he says, confident he’s talking to a telemarketer. No rest for the wicked, after all.

“I don’t suppose you know a Luke Cage and Jessica Jones?” Frank asks, and Foggy’s mouth goes dry.

“Oh god,” he says, straightening up so suddenly that he almost knocks the bottle of iodine off the edge of the bathtub and all over the rug. “What happened? Are they okay? Where are you--I’ll be right there--”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Frank sighs. “Relax, they’re fine. Physically, anyway. Legally, they’re ‘the Mounties aren’t pressing border-hopping charges because it’s Christmas,’ whatever that counts as.”

“The Mounties? Border-hopping?” Foggy repeats, trying to wrap his brain around it. “They went to _Canada_? Why?”

“You’d have to ask them,” Frank says, and he sounds about done with everything now that Foggy’s got the spare brain cells to pay attention. “They’re both pleading the Fifth until the quote-unquote meanest lawyer in the state shows up.”

“Yeah, I don’t think they want Marci Stahl driving up here right now. She’d murder them in cold blood and then beat the rap,” Foggy tells him, not thinking about the fact that he’s telling a law enforcement officer this on what’s probably a recorded line. He could kick himself when it registers.

“Pretty sure they were talking about you,” Frank points out, and Foggy can’t help the hysterical little laugh that bubbles up.

“Oh, boy. Okay, seriously though, where do I come get them?”

Frank rattles off the station’s address, and Foggy stuffs his aching feet into his sneakers and goes to collect HC&B’s crack team of directionally-challenged detectives. It’s not until he has eyes on them that he remembers his promise to text Marci and let her know they’re safe, which he does, with an asterisk that has her texting him back with fifteen question marks as soon as his own text sends.

“Hike go okay?” Frank asks, as Foggy’s filling out the ungodly stack of paperwork that’s involved in zero charges but an acknowledgement that neither of them are welcome on Canadian soil for the next five years.

“Mixed bag,” Foggy admits. “By which I mean everyone else had a blast and I learned a valuable lesson about hiking boots.”

Frank tilts his head at the sullen pair glowering at them from the bench in the cell. Luke looks done with life; Jess looks done with sobriety.

“Can’t you please--” Foggy gestures at the cell door.

“As soon as you’re done with the paperwork,” Frank promises, “and with great pleasure.”

It’s a promise Frank keeps, and Foggy texts Marci back with a timeframe for a full response as soon as Jessica and Luke have collected their things and Foggy has a copy of the casefile.

“What the hell?” Foggy demands, as soon as they’re loaded into the back of the SUV. “ _Canada?_ ”

“So it turns out the GPS that came with the car thinks your parents live in Champlain, Quebec,” Jessica begins.

“And that driving around at night with heavy flurries that close to the border isn’t the best idea anybody ever had when they’ve left their passport at home,” Luke finishes, sounding tired. Now that they’re out of the station, he seems completely exhausted, and Foggy sympathizes.

“You’ve been here two days, and you’re already on a first-name basis with the cops,” Jess comments, arms crossed.

“I also caught a divorce case and made out with opposing counsel,” Foggy informs her. “Oh, and Colleen said yes.”

“Good,” Luke says, and Foggy can tell he means it.

“I threw the prenup in the Saint Lawrence River,” Jessica says, and Foggy can tell she isn’t the least bit sorry.

“While screaming obscenities,” Luke adds, rubbing his temples, and Foggy shrugs. 

“I just assumed, honestly.” He surveys the damage the last day has wrought on them. “Are you two heading back to the city now, or--”

“I’m getting drunk, and Luke’s going to sleep until New Year’s,” Jess tells him. “We can do that in public or not, it’s up to HC&B’s closest representative.”

“My parents’ last remaining spare bedroom, it is,” Foggy says with forced cheer. “Please be nice to them, I’m _this_ close to getting disowned.” He holds his thumb and forefinger up with maybe a quarter inch between them. “Turns out in the game of Christmas, you win or you wind up with a year’s supply of fruitcake.”

Luke frowns at him in the rearview. “So you win or… you win?”

Jessica pats his knee, her expression eloquently communicating the “You poor, benighted fool.” that she’ll never say, and Foggy laughs, because that’s maybe the only silver lining to this entire thing. His mom’s going to kill him, but having a genuinely appreciative and naive audience for her cooking might be oil on troubled waters. “Oh, man. Mrs. Miller is going to love you.”

“Franklin,” his mom hisses, as soon as Luke and Jess are safely tucked away. For all Jess’s talk about drinking to forget, she curls up around Luke and is out like a light almost as soon as he is.

“I’m sorry, mom,” he says, and he really is. “Our boss sent them upstate with something for Danny, and it’s turned into this whole big thing. There’s no room at the inn--believe me, I checked before volunteering you.”

She softens slightly. “So long as they don’t expect--”

“They’re just grateful for a place to sleep and a hot meal before they head back to the city,” Foggy insists, though how they’re going to manage that, he doesn’t know. The train, maybe--the rental agency apparently broke the sound barrier reclaiming the car after the Mounties threatened to impound it. Not that his mom won’t pull out all the stops feeding them. So long as the pair of them can sleep through the party, the rest is smooth sailing.

Foggy goes to call Marci and sees a text from Matt. “Fruitcake? And here I thought we were friends.”

He grins like an idiot. If he didn’t get the Braille perfect, it was at least clear enough that Matt could tell it was for him, from Foggy.

“All’s fair in love and pastries,” he texts back, and he can’t stop smiling. “You still coming to the party?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” is the immediate reply.

It makes the phone call to Marci more fraught than it should be, because he sounds almost happy about Jess and Luke’s misadventure.

“Canada? No wonder they weren’t answering their phones,” she says. “I’d refuse to leave any cellular evidence, too.”

“Not how telemetry works, and you know it,” Foggy tells her. “But they’re resting comfortably now, I’ve got them, they’re fine. If Jeri’s still bent on that prenup, we’re going to need a new copy, though. It didn’t survive contact with law enforcement.”

“Ugh. Is there a chance in hell he’s going to let her sign it?” Marci asks.

“Nope. And even if she did, he wouldn’t.” Foggy’s even more sure of it than he was a week ago, and somehow it feels like they’ve been discussing this since the stone age.

“Then screw it,” Marci says, “it’s Christmas. We took heroic measures, but we couldn’t save the patient.”

“Jeri’s got until they tie the knot to work her magic,” Foggy reminds her.

“They set a date yet?”

“It’s Danny,” Foggy says. “Tomorrow, a decade from now, maybe the next time a lunar eclipse coincides with a harvest moon--there’s no telling.”

“Small favors,” Marci says.

“You’re not still at the office, are you?” Foggy asks.

“Are you kidding me?” she retorts. “It’s Christmas. Of course I’m at the office. It’s deserted, it’s quiet, my neighbors’ peppermint-addled gremlin-children can’t try to hug me.” She stops, as if she’s really considering something. “I could prance around in nothing but those Louboutins you gave me all night, and nobody would be the wiser come Monday morning.”

“I mean, far be it from me to dissuade you from following your bliss,” Foggy says, swallowing, “but please don’t?”

“That handsome wilderness lawyer is a good influence on you,” Marci sighs. “I don’t like it.”

Downstairs, Foggy can hear guests beginning to filter in. “I have to go,” he says. “Go home, Marci. Do something fun. Wear nothing but those Louboutins around your apartment instead of the office.”

She laughs, and it’s a genuine one. “Good night, Foggy. Happy holidays.”

“Happy holidays to you, too.” He hangs up and turns to find Matt, arms folded and that weaponized smirk on his face.

“Do I want to know?” Matt asks.

“HC&B is a reputable firm whose employees are sterling examples of the profession?” Foggy offers.

Matt laughs, and it’s like his whole body opens up with it. Foggy is mesmerized.

Matt sobers after a moment, and he takes off his glasses and goes through the motions of cleaning them on his shirt. “I, ah, might have spent some time looking you up, this morning. One of my old teachers asked, when I told him about you, and I realized I didn’t have as many answers as I’d like.”

“Swear to god, that’s the only time I did a strip-tease in public,” Foggy says, suddenly nervous. There’s a lot someone like Matt could take issue with, in Foggy’s record. Hogarth, Chao, & Benowitz is very much a harm-reduction firm, and his time with Landman & Zack is better left in the past. “And I didn’t even keep any of the money.”

“I’m being serious,” Matt tells him softly. “I didn’t know what to expect, but you… you really dive into the trenches, for your clients.”

“They’re entitled to a vigorous defense,” Foggy answers, because they are.

“I can’t think of five other lawyers who graduated with us who’d have been willing to do a weekend on contempt charges in pursuit of that.”

Foggy flushes. He stood his ground, and a fat lot of good it did his client. He shakes himself and tries to remember the good it did for all the people who didn’t have to deal with an inebriated judge at the worst moment of their lives, after the publicity sparked an investigation and got the judge removed from the bench. Harm-reduction. The system isn’t perfect, but he dug in his heels, and now it’s a little better.

“I think you underestimate our classmates by an order of magnitude,” Foggy says gently. He met a lot of crusaders, at Columbia. Most of them are still in the trenches, and a lot deeper down than he is.

“I only wanted to say, I’m impressed,” Matt murmurs. He puts his glasses back on and offers Foggy his arm. “Buy me a drink, counselor?”

“Any time,” Foggy laughs, linking elbows. 

Matt leans in, and Foggy can just about forget his sore feet as he walks Matt back downstairs. Karen is showing Danny and Colleen the pictures she took in the immediate aftermath of stumbling onto Matt and Foggy--she got a perfect angle of Danny down on one knee, Colleen ecstatic and speechless--and they’re demanding copies. She has their blessing to make it front-page news, it seems, and Foggy thinks that it could be worse. 

Foggy’s mom corners Matt and asks how he liked her cranberry oatmeal cookies, and Foggy finds himself face to face with a man he hasn’t been introduced to but who seems dead set on talking to him.

“Franklin Nelson, I presume?”

“Uh, most people call me Foggy,” Foggy says, looking around. There’s some social contract that just kicked in, and everybody’s studiously ignoring them, which seems weird.

The man nods. “Chuck Outerbridge.”

 _Oh, boy._ Foggy forces a professional smile.

“I need you to listen to me, Mr. Nelson, because I’m only going to say this once,” Mr. Outerbridge says, and Foggy’s already planning an exit that won’t ruin his parents’ party. “My wife is entitled to a bit of fun. I know that. I strayed, and it’s only…” He swallows, composes himself, and plows ahead. “It’s only fair. But I love my wife, Mr. Nelson, and I’ll be damned if I let you spirit her away to some soulless jet-setting life in the city. Not without a fight.”

Foggy stares at him, trying to formulate twenty different responses. None of them are right, and he gives up.

“Mr. Outerbridge…” He rubs the bridge of his nose. “Have you told your wife this?”

Mr. Outerbridge draws himself up, the picture of wounded pride, and Foggy holds up a hand.

“Because your wife is a beautiful woman, Mr. Outerbridge, and a man only has so much restraint. It’s up to her who she picks, and if you can’t even tell her what you just told me, I’m fairly confident of what her decision will be.”

Mr. Outerbridge’s jaw sets, and he sweeps out of the party in what can only be called a dramatic fashion.

“What the hell, son?” his dad asks, once the surprised lull in conversation blows over.

“Attorney-client privilege,” Foggy says, shrugging. 

His father shakes his head. “You didn’t.”

“Well, I mean, she didn’t file anything yet. I recommended arbitration, which it sounds like they won’t need after all.”

“That damn fool,” his dad mutters. He heads back to the kitchen. “Jeanie, sweetheart, have I told you how much I love you lately?”

That has Foggy’s mother’s spider-senses tingling, and he doesn’t wait around to disappoint her for the third time in as many days by explaining why he felt the need to facilitate the Outerbridges’ divorce-cum-reconciliation. He finds Matt in the hall doorway, chatting happily with Danny and Colleen. Karen takes a quick picture with her phone, then smirks at them.

“Matt Murdock finally finds a publicly-acceptable location for mistletoe,” she says. “News at eleven.”

Foggy glances up and can’t help laughing. They are, in fact, directly under a generous sprig of it. When he informs Matt of this fact, a sly grin steals across Matt’s face, and Foggy’s heart skips a beat.

Matt dips his head and catches Foggy’s lips with his own, and Foggy closes his eyes and leans into it. He could get used to this. He could get used to all of this.


End file.
